Spies, Hackers, & Reality Stars: Summer TV Roundup

Shiri Appleby and Josh Kelly on Lifetime's UnREAL.

The growth of television over the last decade-and-a-half has been remarkable. A medium once derided for its vacuity has expanded to dominate much of high culture as well as low, with serious publications featuring detailed exegeses on the nuances of dramas such as Breaking Bad and comedies such as Parks and Recreation. At the same time, TV’s rise has resulted in an explosion of new programming, especially scripted content, leading major critics such as Linda Holmes and Alan Sepinwall to wonder whether, in the latter’s words, there is “too much good scripted television.”

One corollary of scripted TV’s rise has been its expansion to new platforms at the same time that the broadcast networks, once the only game in town, have become increasingly boring and formulaic. “Prestige” television is generally understood to have migrated to outlets such as premium cable, online venues such as Netflix and Amazon, and some basic cable channels such as FX and AMC. However, the proliferation of scripted TV hasn’t stopped there. One of the most notable developments of this past summer has been the appearance of a number of very good shows on unlikely or little-known basic cable channels. The appearance of these shows suggests that even networks that seemed to have found comfortable, if unambitious, niches for themselves are looking to add some of the luster conferred by a quality original series to their reputations. None of these shows represents a radical reinvention of the form, but all of them offer a fresh approach to the now-familiar tropes of television drama.

Out of Focus: USA’s Mr. Robot (Season Two)

At the end of my most recent review, which looked at some of the problems facing Lifetime’s surprise 2015 summer hit UnREAL, I mentioned some concerns about USA’s Mr. Robot, a show that’s also experiencing troubles in its second season. At the time, I’d only seen the season debut, a lengthy double-header that felt scattered and lethargic but which appeared to be planting the seeds for some interesting developments later on. Unfortunately, this season has so far remained as sluggish and unfocused as its initial episode, prompting me to wonder whether it’s lost its way. Mr. Robot’s first season ended with a spectacular hack that crippled the global financial system but left the perpetrators of that coup scattered and confused. Following that up was going to be a difficult task, even if the show’s unique visual style and Rami Malek’s outstanding performance as the main character, hacker Elliot Alderson, hadn’t attracted so much attention and caused the next season to become so highly anticipated. That success has apparently led to creator Sam Esmail being given near-total creative control over the show, which also suggests that we can blame him for the new season’s flaws.

The fundamental issue with the second season of Mr. Robot so far is its lack of focus. As I mentioned when I briefly brought up Mr. Robot at the end of my review of UnREAL’s second season, the most compelling scene in the season premiere (technically the second of two closely-connected, back-to-back episodes) involved a character who had only occasionally registered on the show up until then (and who has since faded back into only intermittent relevance). The season’s now five episodes in, and various characters are still trapped in wildly divergent narrative arcs, none of which promise to intersect in any meaningful way any time soon. This unfocused quality stems in large part from the vacuum created by Elliot’s withdrawal into a cloistered life while he tries to deal with his mental illness and the consequences of his massive hack into corporate conglomerate E Corp. In the first season, we tended to hear or see that name rendered as “Evil Corp,” which is Elliot’s name for them and a reflection of the fact that we’re mostly seeing the show’s events through his fractured psyche. However, working with such a far-flung cast of characters in so many different storylines dilutes the power of experiencing the world through Elliot’s mind and diminishes the show’s unique voice. There’s a theory floating about that his isolation is related to yet another forthcoming narrative twist, one akin to the revelation of the identity of “Mr. Robot” in the first season; if the theory’s true, Esmail hasn’t executed the skew in perspective with sufficient skill to make it worth the slog through a world less tinged with Elliot’s unique sensibility.

All Work and No Play: Bohemian Rhapsody

Gwilym Lee and Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Rock and roll has long seemed wedded to the movies despite the fact that film started a good 50 years before those percussive, jangling refrains entered the mainstream. But the immediacy, intimacy, and gigantism of that shimmering screen is so related to the feeling of excess engendered in rock and pop that it can seem like they have always been intertwined. (A movie like Rebel Without a Cause was so steeped in the youthful mythos of rock that it’s still surprising to realize it was released before rock existed as a mass phenomenon.) Thus it’s no surprise that the lives of rock gods and goddesses have served as fodder for numerous screenplays and treatments. The rock-and-roll biopic is a genre unto itself. The best of these pictures tend to hinge on who portrays the pop deity – if the actor is able to tear into both the myth and reality of their subject, the results can be spectacular, even if the movie itself is so-so. Jamie Foxx was terrific as Ray Charles, Joaquin Phoenix’s astonishing turn as Johnny Cash, and to a lesser extent, Reese Witherspoon’s as June Carter Cash, still haunt me, and Jessica Lange’s Patsy Cline was a revelation. (Lange also had the great fortune to have Robert Getchell writing sharp, incisive dialogue for her.) Both Paul Dano and John Cusack broke my heart as The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, and Beyoncé was mesmerizing as Etta James in the too little-seen Cadillac Records, to name just a few. Even if the movie is out-and-out terrible, a great star turn can make the experience worthwhile. It’s hard to see how Lady Sings the Blues could be much worse, just as it’s almost as hard to see how Diana Ross’s performance could be much better. (Go have the argument whether Lady is a jazz or blues biopic somewhere else: Ross’s performance is pure rock and roll.) But rock cinema is also riddled with great promise greatly denied: Dennis Quaid put all sorts of effort into his portrayal of Jerry Lee Lewis, but never really came to life. Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison was stillborn (perhaps due to director Oliver Stone’s apparent belief there’s no greater rock star than himself), and let’s not talk about Kevin Spacey’s Bobby Darin.

Sophomore Slump: Checking In on UnREAL

Shiri Appleby and Constance Zimmer in UnREAL.

At the end of last summer I wrote about three promising new series – UnREAL, Mr. Robot, and Deutschland 83 – that appeared on television screens over the summer of 2015. One year later, the travails of the first two (Deutschland’s future is uncertain, but a follow-up series probably won’t appear for some time, if at all) offer some insights into how shows can struggle to build on the success of a good first season.

UnREAL, in particular, has caused me to think about a recent suggestion by New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik that “shows get backlash in [Season 2] for flaws that were there in [Season 1] but de-emphasized” because of the thrill felt by critics and audiences alike when they encounter a new show with a unique perspective. It’s a bit of a special case, but True Detective serves as a good example: the first season of HBO’s (now possibly defunct ) anthology crime series met with hysterical raves from just about everyone, except for a few dissenters, which included Critics at Large's Phil Dyess-Nugent. However, those dissenters were vindicated with the advent of Season 2, which featured a new cast and had new directors behind the camera. The main constant was creator Nic Pizzolatto, whose overblown, self-important writing had been a major, if largely unnoticed, flaw from the beginning. With the absence of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson to make his dialogue work, or director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s direction, the flaws with Pizzolatto’s show became glaringly apparent.

Until Dawn, and Then Some

Ashley (Galadriel Stineman) and Chris (Noah Fleiss) find time to fall in love between fending off monsters and murderers.

It’s winter. You and six friends are vacationing at a friend’s remote cottage when tragedy strikes: two of your friends, twin sisters, disappear in the woods under suspicious circumstances, never to be seen again. Exactly one year later, their older brother invites you all back to the cottage to carry on partying in spite of his sisters’ absence, claiming he’s “over it.” Do you go? Most would politely decline, recognizing such a bizarre request as being, at the very least, in poor taste and, at worst, a cry for help. Good horror stories are not built on common sense, however, and Until Dawn’s seven protagonists unanimously pull on their winter gear and march up the mountains of Alberta to indulge their grieving buddy, unaware of the danger waiting for them.

Laughing While Crying: Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge in BBC3's Fleabag, now available on Amazon.

It’s become something of a cliché, when talking about the contemporary TV landscape, to semi-seriously lament the proliferation of half-hour shows that, while ostensibly comedies, aren’t actually funny. One of the fundamental distinctions of the format of a television episode is that half-hour shows are comedies, while episodes that run the full hour (allowing, of course, for commercials) are traditionally dramas. But the emergence of shows like Transparent and, to some degree, Louie have eroded that distinction, leading to a profusion of programs that, well-written and well-acted as they might be, present themselves as comedies when they often stay closer to the dramatic side of the ledger.

One of those many half-hour shows to fly under the radar is Fleabag, a six-episode series from British playwright Phoebe Waller-Bridge that ran on BBC3 last year and is currently available through Amazon. The primary difference is that, unlike its fellow sort-of-not-really comedies, Fleabag is often riotously, scathingly, filthily funny. The show’s an adaptation of Waller-Bridge’s play by the same title, and she also stars as the title character (her odd moniker is a nickname; as with many of the other characters in the show, we never learn her real name).