Network Shows Well Worth Watching: How To Get Away With Murder, Quantico and The Grinder

Viola Davis in ABC's How to Get Away with Murder.

This review contains spoilers.
 
Perusing the end of the year Best of ranked lists for television, I noticed the continuing trend of almost everybody’s lists – from Time to Entertainment Weekly – consisting almost entirely of cable TV series, with only the occasional network show, such as Empire or The Last Man on Earth, thrown into the mix. I get that; the TV critics find the lack of censorship and unfettered content that is de rigueur on cable television to be enormously appealing. But that doesn’t mean that network fare is worthless, even if characters say "bullcrap" instead of "bullshit" and nudity can only be implied. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a world where only network TV, Canadian or American, existed, but my viewing habits still skew towards broadcast programming, though they don’t make up all my viewing. (I eagerly await the fourth season of The Americans which begins on FX on March 16.) Three of the best bets currently on the networks – How to Get Away with Murder, Quantico and The Grinder – prove, too, that variations on familiar themes can be wrung even there, where novelty is not expected to exist. 

Talking Out of Turn #42 (Podcasts): Dr. G. William Jones (1987) and James Earl Jones (1987)

James Earl Jones in John Sayles' Matewan (1987).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, host and producer of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

After the murder of Martin Luther King Jr, in the late sixties, the momentum of the Civil Rights movement seemed to wane. No leader could fill that vacuum and black voices in the eighties became fragmented. Often the question of black identity and culture came up during interviews. The chapter entitled Black Legacies included conversations with figures like author Toni Morrison, film archivist G. William Jones, and actor James Earl Jones. With the Academy Awards approaching – and the controversy over the dearth of black talent among this year's Oscar nominees still heating up – and February being Black History Month, it is timely to bring together the latter two interviews, both conducted in 1987.

Oscar Predictions: Best Animated Short Film

Pixar's Sanjay’s Super Team is one of five films nominated for Best Animated Short Film at this year's Oscars.

Oscar season has begun! While we’re all discussing our picks for this year’s Best Picture and whether or not Leo is finally going to get his Oscar for The Revenant, seeing the nominated short films can sometimes feel like trying to collect all the toys in a series of feature film Happy Meals. Fortunately, ShortsHD has us covered with theatrical releases of this year’s live action and animated shorts in select theatres as well as pay-per-view online streaming. This week, I had the opportunity to catch the Academy’s nominees for Best Animated Short Film at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox. Here’s my ranking of the five films in this category, from weakest to Oscar-winning:

Where the Wild Things (Guit)ar

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, from here to ear. (Photo courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.)

It feels counter-intuitive that in order to reach the aviary nested inside The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts you must descent several flights of stairs to end up in the basement. But this is where, even in the dead of winter, the birds sing and where they also play, but in ways you'd least expect.

The lower level gallery is aflutter with 70 zebra finches who alight on a forest of open-tuned electric guitars – 10 white Gibson Les Pauls and four Gibson Thunderbird basses – lying strings up on a series of stands erected at the four corners of the temperature-controlled MMFA Contemporary Art Space. Small and grey with tiny toothpick feet and triangular beaks the colour of persimmons, the birds fly on and off the musical instruments, triggering a chordal crescendo of wailing distortion that fluctuates in frequency and intensity in accordance to their perching patterns.

Finding the Good-Bad: RedLetterMedia’s Space Cop

Rich Evans in Space Cop, by RedLetterMedia.

I don’t even know how to approach a review of Space Cop. I’ve covered quirky genre indie films and low-budget retro nostalgia-fests, but these categories fail to convey the mad conflux of genre and influence that is Space Cop. It’s part of both categories, and neither of them. I think that to understand it, you have to understand the people at RedLetterMedia who made it – which admittedly doesn’t speak well of the film on its own terms. For an RLM fan, though, it’s exactly as wonderful, idiotic, hilarious, gross, and terrible as you could want.

Sondheim Confab: Sondheim on Sondheim

The cast of Sondheim on Sondheim (with Sondheim, on screen) at Boston's Lyric Stage. (Photo: Mark S. Howard)

By now there have been almost as many Sondheim revues as Sondheim musicals. The first one, Sondheim: A Celebration, was a one-night-only tribute in 1973, while A Little Night Music was running. It set the tone for subsequent showcases of his songs, combining performances by original cast members, covers (Nancy Walker’s rendition of “I’m Still Here” from Follies has yet to be surpassed) and obscure deleted items: “Silly People” and “Two Fairy Tales” from Night Music, “Pleasant Little Kingdom” from Follies, “Love Is in the Air” and “Your Eyes Are Blue” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It was nectar for early Sondheim diehards. Side by Side by Sondheim was put together by Brits and had a successful run in the West End in 1976 (where I saw it) before crossing the Atlantic. Putting It Together also began in London; its 1993 Broadway cast included Julie Andrews and Christopher Durang. Sondheim: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall (also 1993) was televised in truncated form; luckily the entire concert is available on CD. But TV audiences got to see some amazing pieces, like Madeline Kahn singing “Getting Married Today “ from Company, Liza Minnelli and Billy Stritch performing a totally unknown ballad called “Water Under the Bridge” (written for an unproduced movie called Singing Out Loud), and the Boys Choir of Harlem bringing an unlooked-for poignancy to “Our Time” from Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim’s eightieth birthday was the occasion for another event, Sondheim The Birthday Concert (2010), on Live from Lincoln Center; this one had John McMartin recreating his performance of “The Road You Didn’t Take” from Follies, as withering and heartrending as it had been on Broadway four decades earlier. The show’s finale was breathtaking: dozens of alums from Sondheim musicals marched through Lincoln Center singing “Sunday,” the sublime first-act finale of Sunday in the Park with George. A TV doc called Six by Sondheim in 2013 focused on half a dozen significant songs.

Back to School: James Kudelka At Ryerson University

Choreographer James Kudelka working with dancers from the Ryerson Theatre School. (Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh)

Ryerson Theatre School scored a coup when it secured James Kudelka to choreograph its annual student showcase for five performances in Toronto this past November. A former artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, Kudelka has created large scale works for classical dance companies and more experimental pieces for modern and contemporary troupes across the continent. As a dancer, he has performed with ensembles and alone with a puppet. Last year, at age 60, he directed his first play while maintaining his credentials as a baker of artisanal bread. Always up to a challenge, Canada's self-described sex and death choreographer was eager to accept the Ryerson University invitation if only because it allowed him, again, to do something new. The challenge was to work with 57 third- and fourth-year students with varying degrees of dance and stage experience and make them look like seasoned professionals. He pulled it off. Kudelka Meets Ryerson Dances 2015 emerged as an expertly designed work of abstract dance performed with commitment by a group of young amateurs.

Departures: HBO’s Intriguing and Difficult The Leftovers

Margaret Qualley and Justin Theroux in The Leftovers on HBO.

This review contains major spoilers for Season 1 of The Leftovers, as well as some spoilers for Season 2.

Television shows can often inspire devotion bordering on the religious, and the recently-concluded second season of The Leftovers on HBO is no exception. Based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name, and overseen by Damon Lindelof of Lost fame, the show has gone from a divisive and little-watched curiosity to one of the most acclaimed (albeit even less-watched) dramas of the past year.

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XVI

This story will only be relevant to Canadians. Back in June 1979, Conservative leader Joe Clark had just become Prime Minister and unseated the once popular Liberal Pierre Trudeau to form a minority government. It didn't last long. By March 1980, Trudeau had come back from retirement and brought the Clark government down. Once again, he found himself leading the country, but not with the same romantic zeal into the Eighties that he stoked when he took the nation by storm in 1968.

Chucky's Poor Relation: William Brent Bell’s The Boy

Lauren Cohan in The Boy, directed by William Brent Bell. (Photo: David Bukach/STX)

There was once a really great restaurant review of Guy Fieri’s Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar by Pete Wells for the New York Times that was composed entirely of questions: Had Guy ever actually eaten at his own restaurant? Was he too struck by “how very far from awesome” the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? The spirit of that review – of confusion, astonishment – is very close to how I feel about William Brent Bell’s horror film, The Boy, which hit theatres last week. In the interest of sparing Wells the flattery of imitation, I’ll do my best to articulate some thoughts on a movie that inherently resists thinking.

Paradise is a Lonely Place: Dylan LeBlanc's Cautionary Tale

Dylan LeBlanc may soon be a household name in contemporary song writing. In spite of the fact that he's only 26 years old, his tales of woe come from an old soul. His new album Cautionary Tale (Single Lock Records) was released on January 15, and it may be his most extroverted collection to date. LeBlanc debuted in 2010 to critical acclaim for Paupers Field (Rough Trade). His melancholy first album had some critics comparing him to Gram Parsons. In fact Emmylou Harris, who sang with Parsons, adds her voice to “If The Creek Don’t Rise.” Soon LeBlanc was opening for prestigious artists such as Lucinda Williams and Laura Marling. After his 2012 album, Cast The Same Old Shadow, LeBlanc was now opening for Drive-By Truckers and Alabama Shakes. But he didn’t handle his early success very well. His new album is a calm, introspective collection of songs about his life after getting over a bout of excessive drinking and reckless behaviour. Cautionary Tale casts himself as a mystic as opposed to just another singer-songwriter seeking redemption.

The Grandmaster Returns: Ip Man 3

Donnie Yen as Ip Man in Ip Man 3

Martial arts films – at least those given wide Western releases – are generally pretty formulaic. The hero will more often than not be a representation of a figure from Asian history, like Wong Fei Hung (a real-life master of kung fu who has been played by almost all of martial arts cinema’s greats). The narrative will often be pared down to its barest elements, acting simply as a framework in which spectacular action can occur. There’s always a martial arts school, a master, a young upstart, a rival teacher, and a gaggle of gormless disciples. It’s not accurate to say that if you’ve seen one kung fu film, you’ve seen them all, but it’s fair to say that if you’ve seen one of Donnie Yen’s Ip Man films, you’ll know what you’re in for with the third installment.

Ghosts: The Body of an American and Our Mother’s Brief Affair

Michael Cumpsty and Michael Crane in The Body of an American, at the Hartford Stage. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Dan O’Brien’s The Body of an American, currently playing at Hartford Stage, has already been performed at Portland Center Stage in Oregon and at the Gate in London; it’s won four different playwriting awards and is bound for New York. Yet it still feels like a work in progress – like ideas for a play that O’Brien hasn’t worked through. He based it on a series of interactions with journalist Paul Watson, first on e-mail and then during a visit he made to Watson in the Arctic in 2010. Watson reported on war zones throughout the world for The Toronto Star and The Los Angeles Times and early in his career, in 1994, won the Pulitzer Prize for a photograph he took of a dead American soldier, Sergeant William Cleveland, in Mogadishu. (He retired from The Toronto Star last year.) But the play, a two-hander, can’t make up its mind whether it’s about Watson (Michael Cumpsty) or about O’Brien (Michael Crane) writing a play about Watson. The first seems an eminently worthy idea, the second a self-indulgence – especially since, for all of Dan’s claim of identification with Paul, they don’t seem remotely comparable. Considering what Paul has seen in Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq and other places, Dan’s stories about his alienation from his family and his brother’s depression, and in particular his feelings of inferiority in Paul’s presence, his sense that he’s somehow been bested by this reporter, come across as self-aggrandizing and distasteful.

The German Occupation of France: Complexities

German officers at a sidewalk café on the Champs-Élysées in July 1940, one month after the Nazi invasion of France.

“One who has not suffered the horrors of an occupying power has no right to judge a nation that has.”

– Anthony Eden, former British Prime Minister, from The Sorrow and the Pity.

French television refused to air Marcel Ophuls’ landmark 4 1/2-hour documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969); its 1971 cinematic release punctured a powerful myth promoted after the war by Charles De Gaulle: that the French nation by and large heroically resisted the Germans during the four-year occupation. Ophuls makes it clear that the majority of Frenchmen were neither supporters of the Germans nor members of the resistance. Rather, they went along quietly with the wartime collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain. Regardless of how they behaved, for a variety of reasons, the vast majority of French citizens opted for remaining silent, even those who acted heroically.

In his prologue to The Cost of Courage (Other Press, 2015), Charles Kaiser, a former reporter turned author, describes how he first encountered that strange silence when he met the French family that had lodged his uncle, a GI named Henry Kaiser, in Paris during the last year of the war. From his uncle, Charles heard stories of their heroism: “The most dramatic movie about the war,” the nephew writes, “was the one I learned by heart but had seen only in my head.” Yet when he finally met the surviving members of the Boulloche family as a child in the early 1960s, they were reticent about their war experiences: “It would take me five decades, including two and a half years living in France, to unravel the reasons for the heroes’ silence.” It is the author’s connection with this cultured, upper-middle-class Catholic family, particularly with the daughter, Christiane, that gives The Cost of Courage its distinctive resonance. Only after the death of her siblings is Christiane willing to share with Kaiser the family’s harrowing experiences during the Occupation. Assisted by declassified British documents, letters, diaries and conversations with the children of the next generation, the author narrates a powerful account of one family’s courage, guilt and pain. He supplements their story with the larger historical context of the war. Initially, this device appears jarring, juxtaposing a thriller-like narrative written in the present tense with a more conventional historical overview. But as we become accustomed to it, it begins to work, especially when he is able to weave the two threads together with the onset of the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Talking Out of Turn #41 (Podcast): Joel and Ethan Coen (1984)

A scene from Joel and Ethan Coen's Blood Simple (1984)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

On the Nose: TBS's Angie Tribeca

Hayes MacArthur, Rashida Jones,and Alfred Molina in Angie Tribeca, on TBS.

As you no doubt keep hearing, we live in a particularly crowded era of television. Every day, it seems, a new TV series premieres and another drops away. Television executives are bemoaning that even quality shows can't find the audiences they need to survive, and professional television critics have admitted that they can't keep up. What is a basic cable network to do? This past Sunday and Monday, TBS premiered the first season of Angie Tribeca ... all at once. From 9pm on Sunday to 10pm on Monday, TBS aired the show's first 10-episode season five times, back-to-back and commercial free, in an 'event' they (accurately) called a 25-Hour Binge-A-Thon. The show, prior to its premiere, has already been renewed for a second season. So, fun fact: if you weren't watching TBS last Monday, you are already a season behind on Angie Tribeca. I suppose now the only question is whether or not you should care…

From the Vault – Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout: New Vegas was developed by Bethesda Softworks and Obsidian Entertainment in 2010.

Sources claim that Bethesda's highly anticipated video game title, Fallout 4, sold over 200% more copies on its first day of sales than its predecessor, Fallout: New Vegas. Taking into account the five years between releases and the people who probably purchased after launch day, my (admittedly questionable) math estimates that as many as 1 in 3 people who own Fallout 4 might not have even played New Vegas, let alone the number of gamers who have yet to even touch this brilliant franchise. This, friends, is a shame, and today I'm going to take a minute to implore you to backtrack and get acquainted with the game that gave Fallout 4 its deserved hype in the first place.

Neglected Gem #88: Alternative 3 (1977)

Alternative 3: Host Tim Brinton.

The hour-long television documentary Alternative 3 was shown in England in 1977, under the incomparably bland title “Science Report.” Though broadcast on the night of June 20, the program’s closing credits dated it April 1. Many missed the hint. Written by David Ambrose, directed by Christopher Miles, produced by Anglia Television, and broadcast by ITV, Alternative 3 was probably the most successful media hoax since Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radiocast. The two works have much in common: each was fiction disguised as documentary, blurring the two in ways that were innovative and, some felt, pernicious; each locked into existing fears—in one case, foreign invasion and world war; in the other, government conspiracy and global catastrophe—and foreshadowed developments to come.

Cowpoke Gumbo: Bone Tomahawk

Patrick Wilson, Kurt Russell, Richard Jenkins and Matthew Fox in Bone Tomahawk.

One of the films from 2015 that slipped through the festival circuit and straight to the on-demand market, flying totally under the radar for most moviegoers, also happens to be one of my favourites of the year. It cheers me to know that films like Bone Tomahawk, starring Kurt Russell (wearing his still-burgeoning pre-Hateful Eight power-stache), still have a place in our cinematic ecosystem. Then again, I can’t imagine there ever not being a place for low-budget genre mashup perfection like this, as long as there are weirdos like me for whom Westerns and cannibal gorefests are equally appealing.

Brando on Brando, and Two Valedictories

Actor Marlon Brando is the subject of new documentary, Listen to Me Marlon.

Late in his life Marlon Brando recorded a series of audiotapes on which he put down his thoughts about his life and his career and, unexpectedly, about acting – unexpectedly because in the handful of interviews he agreed to after The Godfather made him famous again he tended to talk about the subject with disdain or to dismiss it altogether. Of course those of us for whom Brando was (and still is) the greatest of all American actors took his slighting of acting with a hefty helping of salt. It’s understandable that his political commitments to civil rights and especially the cause of Native Americans prompted him to put what actors do for a living in perspective and theorize that performing in front of a camera simply isn’t as important to the world as fighting injustice. But the man who put cotton in his mouth to get the right sound for Don Corleone and determined to showcase his humanity rather than play him as a gangster-movie villain (clearly with the collusion of Francis Coppola and his co-writer Mario Puzo), the man who allowed Bernardo Bertolucci to shoot him emotionally as well as physically naked in Last Tango in Paris, was still an actor profoundly committed to his art. And that was after years of making – and often transcending – the crap Hollywood mostly handed him after the too-brief halcyon days when he was generally recognized as the most exciting actor in the world. Even when he was in semi-retirement on his Tahitian island, emerging only occasionally to make movie appearances for which he charged exorbitant fees, he almost always gave audiences something to watch. His power is hardly diminished in movies like A Dry White Season, Don Juan DeMarco, The Score or The Freshman (where he does a witty parody of his own work in The Godfather), and he’s mesmerizing – and deeply unsettling – as George Lincoln Rockwell in an episode of the TV miniseries Roots II. Still, it’s amazing to discover that Brando left behind hours of commentary on acting, confirming – if confirmation was needed – his dedication to his chosen profession.