Hyde and C.K.

Louis C.K. performing on-stage in 2015. (Photo: Charles Sykes)

The current explosion of allegations of sexual abuse and predatory behavior by powerful men in the entertainment industry is a sign of health. A year after a solid minority of the American electorate chose as our president a man who sees women as accessory items to be bought, used, and judged on their looks – and who has sought to empower and has surrounded himself with misogynists, homophobes, and racists – people with stories to tell are coming forward, in some cases after decades of fearful silence, and exposing rich, influential, deeply entrenched power players as monsters. It's clear by now that a seismic shift in public perception and a redefinition of what's acceptable behavior – and not just the behavior of the predators themselves, but those who become complicit in their actions by keeping their secrets and giving them cover – is necessary if the toxic slime infecting the culture and impacting people's careers is going to be cleared away. Some of the ugliest behavior has been on the part of men who've been shaping the culture for more than a generation, like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. But those two are also past their prime as movers and shakers and had plenty of enemies who were happy to see them fall. When it became general knowledge that Cosby is a serial rapist, the news had a special shock built into it because of the millions of TV viewers who, having first discovered him at the midpoint of his career, thought of him as a dispenser of paternal wisdom and family values, both in real life and as the star of The Cosby Show. And Weinstein worked hard at molding his sham image as a nurturer of talent and the businessman hero who made independent American cinema possible and popular. But did anyone in the year of our lord 2017 actually like them?

What about this Place: Louis C.K's Horace and Pete

Steve Buscemi and Louis C.K. in Horace and Pete.

Sometimes I wonder why do we tear ourselves to pieces / I just need some time to think / Or maybe I just need a drink / At Horace & Pete’s.

– from the theme song to Horace and Pete, written and performed by Paul Simon. 

On January 30, without fanfare, press release, or social media campaign, Louis C.K. sent out a mass email to his fans: “Hi there. ‘Horace and Pete’ episode one is available for download. $5. Go here to watch it. We hope you like it. Regards, Louis.” (Subsequent episodes were downloadable at a lesser cost: $2 for episode two and $3 for each episode after that.) For the past six years, C.K.'s Louie has been the standard bearer for indie TV within the network model, so this move to direct-to-consumer series distribution seems, though maybe only in retrospect, like a natural next step for him. Unlike Louie, which remains a comedy (albeit a dark and sometimes surreal one), Horace and Pete is a drama, in every best sense of the word: both in that it has the deliberate texture of a stage production and that it lands with a surprising weight of reality.

A Portrait of the Comedian as a Middle-Aged Man: The Painful Pleasures of FX’s Louie

Louis C.K. and Hadley Delaney in FX's Louie.

Ever wondered what it would look like if you mixed television comedy with indie filmmaking budget and sensibilities? Now that Louis C.K.’s darkly funny series Louie has returned for a second season, you can wonder no more.  Loosely based on his real life (as a 40-something, recently divorced comedian with joint custody of his two young daughters), Louis C.K. has been given unprecedented control over the content and direction of the series. With a promise to FX to keep the budget to shoestring levels, the network has agreed to stay out of his way, leaving C.K. to star, write, direct, edit, produce, and even cast every episode. Gleefully mixing gross-out comedy with existential anxiety, a single episode can casually touch on themes of post-divorce loneliness, the joys and traumas of parenthood, the aging male body, and even mortality itself. Last week’s episode (the second season premiere) may have hinged on an epic bout of flatulence, but it was also one of the most poignantly painful stories Louie has ever told. I’m not sure if Louie is the saddest comedy in the history of television or its funniest tragedy. Either way, it is one of the most original shows on TV today.

Different Perspective: Pamela Adlon's Better Things

Pamela Adlon in Better Things on FX.

Better Things, Pamela Adlon’s new comedy on FX, does an excellent job of summing itself up in its opening scene. Adlon’s character Sam is sitting on a bench, looking at her phone while her youngest daughter, Duke (Olivia Edward) stands sobbing next to her. After a little while, Sam looks up and catches the disapproving stare of the elderly woman on the other end of the bench and confronts her, explaining that Duke is crying because Sam won’t buy her a cheap trinket and inviting the older woman to go ahead and buy it for her if she’s so concerned about the little girl. It’s hard not to read that opening scene in terms of star Adlon’s role on Louie, another sort-of comedy on FX in which she frequently appeared as comedian Louis C.K.’s on-again-off-again romantic interest (Louis C.K.’s also heavily involved as a producer on this show, so it seems fair to compare the two programs). In that show, we saw her primarily through the fictionalized Louie’s eyes (both shows feature comedians playing somewhat autobiographical versions of themselves) and at times her character threatened to become a twenty-first century version of the maddening temptress, the woman whom the main character desired but could never really possess. Louie was ultimately much smarter than that, but it’s still refreshing to see Adlon introduce a slightly different version of her character and show us life from her perspective. As the woman on the bench learns, there’s a lot more to Sam than the sardonic, seemingly uncaring front that she presents to the world.

The Upside Down: Musings on a Year Watching Television

Pamela Adlon in FX's Better Things.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. And discontent is a good thing: people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different...

– Neil Gaiman, from The View from the Cheap Seats

2016 has been a long year, an awful year… even (to paraphrase Judith Viorst) a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. As I type this, news of the sudden passing of Debbie Reynolds has emerged close on the heels of the woefully premature death of her daughter, Carrie Fisher – adding to the body count of a year that seemed to be almost gleefully stealing our brightest lights. But, eager as I am to finally see the back of this year, taking on the task of reflecting on the past twelve months of television has been genuinely heartening. It has been an eventful – too eventful – year in the real world, but for television it has also been a time of innovation, and further strengthened my belief that TV has never been as good, as smart, as brave, and as human as it is now. It may feel more like a decade ago, but it was only last January that Louis C.K. unceremoniously gifted us the first episode of his stripped-down and ground-breaking Horace and Pete, and only six months ago that Netflix premiered Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers’ unabashed and brilliant homage to the best of the 80s, from Steven Spielberg to John Carpenter to George Lucas and Stephen King. And then last September, Netflix pulled the curtain back from its small corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and introduced us to Luke Cage – a series that, despite some plot weaknesses late in its first season, jumped with both feet into our difficult times and provided us with some of the year’s most compelling hours of television. In a year when reality threatened to overtake our imagination, both in menace and absurdity, television kept pace – providing escape, insight, and regular and much-needed reminders that the human race has more up its sleeve than the ever-darkening headlines suggest. A small caveat: what follows is not a complete ranked list of what television has offered these past 12 months, but rather a few reflections on where television has taken me in 2016.

The Best of CAL 2017

Critics at Large Summer Meeting, August 4/17 (l.to r. Kevin Courrier, Danny McMurray, Steve Vineberg, Devin McKinney, Justin Cummings, Bob Douglas and Mark Clamen)

Back in January 2010, David Churchill, Shlomo Schwartzberg and I came up with the idea of Critics At Large. We envisioned a daily online arts journal that would provide for us the freedom to write – a freedom we were beginning to lose working in magazines and newspapers. Growing rapidly tired of plying our trade in a field where desperate careerism was taking the place of collegiality and editors were beginning to reward expedience, we wanted to remain more true to the pleasures of critical writing. We also wanted to discover what kind of reader we could cultivate and who they might turn out to be. Over the last eight years, many things changed in both our writing and in our audience. For one thing, Critics At Large became less a haven for frustrated writers and more an accomodating home for a diverse and hopeful group who saw the magazine as a possibility. We began attracting a motley crew from various backgrounds who helped change Critics at Large for the better. A number of men and women, young and old, experienced and not, came to shape our identity rather than take on the one we already had. Along that path, we also attracted veteran arts critics who wanted to continue to address the work that inspired them, but we also drew inexperienced writers trying to find the true value of having a voice to speak with. When I read individual pieces each day, I marvel at the sheer range of material and the keen passion each writer brings to their subject. As for our readers, not only have they been rapidly growing, but the diversity of opinion in the magazine has helped us reach out to a much wider audience.What became most important for me, as one of its co-founders, was watching Critics At Large grow beyond my own expectations into a continually morphing organism that embraces the freedom our writers bring to it. For those who believe that arts criticism isn't about having the right opinion, but instead is a means by which the writer and reader mutually discover their own personal relationship to the arts, I think we are succeeding in getting there. As a way to celebrate that goal, and, I suppose, to amply demonstrate it, here is a look back at some of my own favourite pieces from 2017. They aren't presented in any order of preference. Rather than commenting on the writer and their work, I've selected specific quotes that I think best reflects their value to me as critics. As I continue on as editor, writer, and reader, I can truly say that I'm proud to call them colleagues.

Kevin Courrier
Editor-in-Chief
Critics At Large

When I'm 24: HBO’s Girls Brings A Smart New Voice To Comedy

Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet star in Girls on HBO

I recently sat down and watched the first two episodes of HBO’s much-publicized new comedy series Girls. Since I had been studiously avoiding most of the press, all I knew going in was that people were excited by it. I didn’t really know why, and I honestly did not know what to expect. Earlier this year, HBO cleared the way for Girls and for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Veep by letting go of How to Make It in America and Bored to Death, two other Brooklyn-centred comedies which I already miss dearly. But if Girls is really the result of those casualties, it is just possible that those serious losses may not be quite the end of television as we love it.

Southern Charm: Aziz Ansari's Master of None

Aziz Ansari and Noël Wells in Netflix's Masters of None.

There are a long list of reasons why you should check out Aziz Ansari's new Netflix original series, Master of None. In addition to its patient and low-key storytelling, the comedy also offers a host of charming and genuinely human characters, refreshing and pointed takes on race, identity, and gender, not to mention some very funny things to say about texting. But the best reason why Master of None is en route to become the sleeper comedy hit of this fall television is Aziz Ansari himself.

Insider Outsiders: Hulu's Difficult People

Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner star in Difficult People, on Hulu.

This past fall, IFC premiered a comedy called Garfunkel and Oates. The short-lived series starred Riki Lindhome ("Garfunkel") and Kate Micucci ("Oates") as a female musical comedy duo trying to make it in Hollywood, one NSFW folk song at a time. Admittedly I came a bit late to the party, only watching the show after IFC had already cancelled it, and only even becoming aware of it because of Lindhome's new Comedy Central series Another Period, which she co-stars and co-created with Chelsea Lately regular Natasha Leggero. (Another Period, a scatological "parody of manners" best described as Downton Abbey meets Keeping Up with Kardashians – and whose cast also includes Mad Men's Christina Hendricks – will finish its first season at the end of the month and is also among the most pleasurable of this summer's guilty pleasures.) Garfunkel and Oates is buoyed by the unassuming charm of its lead players and (unapologetically borrowing from HBO's Flight of the Conchords) provides ample opportunity for well-produced cutaway videos of the kinds of songs that have made the duo famous on YouTube over the years. It also offers a timely glimpse into the pandemic sexism of the internet and the comedy world in general. (Asked by a comedy club owner "Please, no material about your periods," the two acquiesce only to segue into a lengthy on-screen conversation about, of course, their periods.) Garfunkel and Oates – like the act which inspired it – was alternately biting and adorable, and was, for its brief time on our airwaves, always entertaining.

Shows about comedians, with the comics playing slightly tweaked versions of themselves, have long been a TV staple. From Jack Benny to Garry Shandling to Jerry Seinfeld to Larry David to the sublime Louis C.K., the list includes some of the funniest and often most innovative shows on television. (As last year's lamentable Mulaney demonstrates, however, the trope isn't always a guarantee of success: Mulaney felt a little like what I would have imagined the fictional series "NBC" commissioned from George and Jerry in the middle seasons of Seinfeld to have been like.) This past year, along with Garfunkel and Oates, television has added two new shows to that list, both notably about the travails of comedy duos: FX's (already cancelled) mockumentary-styled The Comedians (starring Billy Crystal and Josh Gad), and now Hulu's Difficult People. The latter premiered on Hulu on August 5, and will release one new episode a week until mid-September.

FX’s Terriers: Catch a Ride with a Trickster and a Travelin’ Man

Terriers (on FX)

For Shady Kanfi

For the most part, the FX Network was good to me in 2010. By mid-summer, they had already premiered three of my favourite new series of the year: in comedy, the hilarious and deeply original Louis C.K. vehicle, Louie; in animation, the surprisingly funny, edgy, and intelligent spy spoof, Archer; and in drama, the hard-boiled contemporary Western, Justified, based on the work of Elmore Leonard and starring Timothy Olyphant. (All three shows have been renewed and will bring us second seasons in 2011.) But the folks at FX weren’t done yet: on September 8th, they premiered Terriers. Created by screenwriter Ted Griffin (Ocean's Eleven) and The Shield creator Shawn Ryan, Terriers stars Donal Logue (Life, Grounded for Life) as Hank Dolworth, an ex-cop and recovering alcoholic, who teams up with Britt Pollack, his best friend and mostly reformed thief (played by Michael Raymond-James, True Blood), to open an unlicensed private investigation firm. Based on the early promos for the series, I had initially positioned the series in relation to The Good Guys, the good-natured buddy-cop show created by Matt Nix (Burn Notice), which premiered on FOX over the summer (and was cancelled last month). But halfway through the opening credits of Terriers (and the original theme song written by the show’s composer Rob Duncan), I knew I was going to be delightfully mistaken. With substantial characters and two charismatic stars, some powerful writing and subtle serial nature, Terriers would soon rise to the level of FX’s spring season hit, Justified. While often hilarious, the show was also carefully plotted, and offered a perfect mix of compelling characters, dark humour, and genuine intrigue. Unfortunately, by early December, FX announced that due to low ratings it was not going to renew Terriers. But whatever its future, Terriers will remain one of the few bright spots in what was an often disappointing new fall TV season.

Estranged: Schitt's Creek and Baskets

Catherine O’Hara, Annie Murphy, Eugene Levy, and Daniel Levy in Schitt's Creek.

Schitt’s Creek (stylized as Schitt$ Creek), a CBC sitcom airing in the U.S. on the Pop network, is in its second season; Baskets, on FX, has just ended its first. Both are comedies of estrangement centering on dysfunctional families, and both show a desire to dig – patiently, obliquely, as if with a jailhouse spoon – toward the human parts of obtuse or abrasive characters. Despite being resistant to quick affinity or effortless love, each has been renewed for another year. That’s a fine thing: there are audiences out here for them, and everyone deserves a chance to find each other.

Daydream Nation: FX's Atlanta

Donald Glover and Brian Tyree Henry in Atlanta.

Donald Glover, the star and creator of the FX series Atlanta, maintains a rap career under the name Childish Gambino, and anyone who saw Glover as Troy Barnes on Community will think they have an idea of what a childish Gambino is like. Troy, a high school football star tentatively easing into adult life as a community college student, initially came across as kid’s idea of a confident, swaggering jock, but that’s because his aggressive, socially well-adjusted persona was a pose. Once Troy embraced his true character as a lonely nerd in search of a playmate and began spending all his time playing games and obsessing over old TV shows with the master nerd Abed (Danny Pudi), he grew increasingly childlike, to the point of losing his jock’s sexual aura and becoming a human stuffed animal. It was to Glover’s enormous credit that he managed to make this seem less like a regression than like the self-realization of someone who’d been hiding behind a false front and needed some time in the playroom before becoming an adult.

For fans of Community, or even Glover’s often witty and intoxicating nerd-rap, the first surprise of Atlanta is that Glover – lithe, bearded, and heavy-lidded – is very much an adult. As Earn, who’s back home in Atlanta after dropping out of college, he has the presence of a man who’s been kicked around the block a few times and is ready to claim his place in the world and do right by the people he cares about. If anything, he’s more precariously lost than Troy, in the limbo of his community-college safe space, ever was. Earn arrives in town with no money, job, or prospects, just an uncertain relationship with Vanessa (Zazie Beetz), a schoolteacher who’s the mother of his baby daughter. Troy’s face would sometimes freeze in an expression of smiling terror when he was afraid reality was about to catch up with him and present him with something he couldn’t bluff his way out of. Panic seems to be outside Earn’s emotional range, even when, in the wake of a ridiculous shooting incident, he’s arrested and has to spend most of a night and much of the next day idly waiting for bail money to arrive.

Tensions between History and Film: Trumbo

Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo in Trumbo.

Before a scene is shot, a screenplay is necessary. The screenwriter may draw upon his own imagination as well as other source material, as does John McNamara in Trumbo. But therein also lies a major problem: McNamara conveys skewed or caricatured portraits of gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, actors John Wayne and Edgar G. Robinson, but also relies substantially on Bruce Cook’s hagiographic 1977 biography Trumbo (reissued in 2015), a source that the screenwriter acknowledges having read ten times. Cook did extensive interviews, including with Dalton Trumbo himself, to write primarily about his personal life and professional career as Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter before the blacklist. During those repressive times, he peddled scripts to small independent companies and then used a “front” who pretended to be the writer. Two of his scripts, for which he could not be credited, won Oscars.

Unfortunately, Dalton Trumbo’s politics is given short shrift in Cook’s biography, a major flaw that is reflected in the film, given that Trumbo’s politics is the driving force behind making the film. As a result, Jay Roach has directed a simplistic, superficial and curiously apolitical biopic – notwithstanding a few heated exchanges about labour strikes in the film industry and Trumbo handing out leaflets – that drains the historical setting from 1946 until the early 1960s of any real context. I say curious because his earlier effort, Game Change, a television movie about John McCain’s disastrous decision to choose Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate, is an insightful political film and vastly superior to this mediocre and occasionally embarrassing, puerile production. The blacklist that deprived hundreds of Hollywood personalities of their jobs polarized Americans. Roach’s Trumbo has replicated that polarization – some critics calling it a “thoughtful account” and a “sobering true event” while others have dismissed it as a “whitewash.” Unfortunately, I must side with the latter assessment, but for different reasons.

Songs We Continue to Sing: Rob Ford and the Culture of Corruption

The night Rob Ford was elected Mayor of Toronto, almost four years ago, he had just won a bitterly fought battle to lead the city, and he did it by marshalling and manipulating a populist rage towards city government. Ford had warned us of a "gravy train" of bureaucratic waste depriving us of our hard-earned taxed dollars. While he positioned himself as city saviour, he also began targeting those he described as 'liberal elites,' a pampered, educated and entitled bunch, whom he saw as the true enemy of the hard-working individual. If Margaret Thatcher had once casually dismissed the notion that society actually existed, Ford went a step further. He talked about the city of Toronto only in terms of the taxpayer rather than in terms of its citizens. Since we all pay taxes – even when we're homeless and buy a cup of coffee – taxpayer was merely a code word for property owner. To Ford, Toronto wasn't a diverse and multiculturally vibrant urban community, made up of those who are privileged and those who aren't; it was instead a dysfunctional corporation he was about to restore to efficiency. His message to the city, where he alone could determine those he'd serve and those he wouldn't, was communicated with obscene clarity on the day of his coronation. CBC Television broadcaster and former NHL coach Don Cherry had arrived in his flamingo pink suit to drape the chain of office around Ford's neck. It was Cherry who helped set the new tone for the city in his opening remarks. "Well, actually I'm wearing pinko for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything," Cherry began with cheers from the crowd in the upper rotunda while city counsellors sat in shock. "I say he's going to be the greatest mayor this city has ever, ever seen, as far as I'm concerned – and put that in your pipe, you left-wing kooks." One thing certain in those tone-setting remarks: contempt was now public policy.

Summer Musicals

Mary Antonini as Reno Sweeney and the cast of Anything Goes. (Photo: David Cooper.)

This article includes reviews of musicals at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as well as at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine.

Anything Goes opened on Broadway in 1934 and proved to be Cole Porter’s biggest hit until Kiss Me, Kate nearly a decade and a half later; it ran for 420 performances, hefty for the time. But it just escaped turning into a fiasco because the book Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, writing from different cities, cobbled together was so scattershot that the producer, Vinton Freedley, asked the director, Howard Lindsay, to rewrite it. With the collaboration of Russel Crouse he did so in three weeks, while the show was in tryouts out of town, and that’s the version audiences saw whenever it was produced over the next half-century. Lewis Milestone made a sweet movie of it in 1936 with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, (the leading lady of the Broadway production), though I suspect even many Porter devotees don’t know it. (The 1956 M-G-M movie with Crosby, Donald O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor, has nothing in common with the show except the title and, in the opening section, a shipboard setting.) There was only one major revival, off-Broadway in 1962, which cut a few of the songs and interpolated others from the Porter archive, like “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue (which has become a permanent addition) and “Take Me Back to Manhattan” from The New Yorkers. When it finally returned to Broadway in 1987, with Patti LuPone in the Merman role, Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman rewrote it, staying faithful to the spirit of the original but making their own emendations to the score. This is the Anything Goes that Kathleen Marshall directed triumphantly in a 2011 Broadway revival starring Sutton Foster and Joel Grey, and it’s the one graced by an ebullient production at the Shaw Festival this season (in their Festival Theatre) directed and choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad.