The Shows of Summer, 2018 Edition

Summer is properly here, and with it all the TV shows deemed too weird or too niche to make it in more prestigious weather.  I admit that I've noped out of several shows whose flimsiness felt appropriate to the season but not really to my taste, like the virtual reality procedural Reverie or the Castle-in-reverse detective show Take Two.  And on the other hand, some more serious fare, like FX's Pose, felt a little more earnest and heartfelt than I can take right now in the sweltering heat.  But here are a few shows that hit the exact sweet-spot between shlocky and highbrow, and helped me greet the summer (in my air-conditioned living room) with appropriate flair.

• A Very English Scandal - I'm a little surprised that this BBC miniseries hasn't received more attention from people in my various feeds, since it seems to tick so many boxes of stuff people like.  Hugh Grant, in full Paddington 2 smarm mode, plays Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the British Liberal party (precursors of today's Liberal Democrats) during the 60s and 70s, who is also a closeted gay man.  Ben Whishaw plays Norman Scott, Thorpe's former lover, who over a span of years intermittently contacts and harasses Thorpe, asking for money, favors, or just acknowledgment that what they had existed.  Thorpe decides that his best course of action is to kill Scott, to which end he enlists a cabal of increasingly dim and incompetent middlemen and assassins, which leads to a botched attempt, a trial, a public scandal, and the end of Thorpe's career.  The whole thing comes to us (via a nonfiction book by John Preston) from the pen of Russell T. Davies, who takes the opportunity afforded by this improbable but nevertheless real historical event to discuss the lives of gay men in mid-20th century Britain.
  
  A first, and obvious, point of comparison for A Very English Scandal is this spring's The Assassination of Gianni Versace.  Both are true crime stories that use a shocking act of violence as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the lives of gay men in a society where their sexuality is no longer illegal, but still incompatible with "respectable" life.  But Assassination--despite stunning central performances from Darren Criss as the serial killer Andrew Cunanan, and Finn Wittrock and Cody Fern as two of his victims--is perhaps a little too self-serious.  Scandal approaches the same subject matter with significantly more humor--the other point of comparison I found myself returning to while watching was I, Tonya, and like that movie the miniseries is a very black comedy in which everyone is an idiot, but also afforded great sympathy and moments of dignity.  Taking its lead from Thorpe himself, a dynamic, magnetic rogue who seems to get things done through sheer force of personality, Scandal refuses to take any of its events very seriously, even as it circles around some genuinely awful truths--that Thorpe was right to believe that being outed would destroy his career; that the British press were far more interested in the details of his sexual relationship with Scott than in the fact that he ordered a murder; and that the sexuality of his victim (and the fact that Scott, unlike Thorpe, lived openly as a gay man) made it highly unlikely that he'd face consequences for his actions.
  
  Much time, therefore, is spent on minutiae, on manners that only lightly conceal a naughty or even depraved truth, and on the silliness of all these efforts to keep up a respectable face.  Whether it's Thorpe trying to maneuver his way into a relationship with a naive Scott without ever calling it by name, or trying to maneuver his way out of it, once he gets bored, by pretending that they were never more than friends.  Or Scott's constant harping on insignificant details--a running gag is his complaint that Thorpe promised to replace his lost national insurance card but never did so--as a substitute for the recognition he so clearly craves.  Or the would-be assassins' bumbling, movie-inspired attempts to lure Scott to his death with promises to protect him from other, nonexistent killers.  There's great humor in all of these sequences, but interspersed with them are moments of genuine emotion, when the mask of English detachment slips and one sees what's behind it all--a real, and entirely justified, fear of being found out.  When Thorpe tells his only real friend (Alex Jennings in a performance that rivals his turn as the pickled, peevish Edward VIII in The Crown) that legalizing homosexuality will not give gay men dignity or freedom, and that he would take his own life if he were ever exposed, there's a sudden lurch into genuine vulnerability that is almost too much to take.  Other scenes--Jennings pointing out that despite his effeminate presentation and obvious triviality, Scott's willingness to face up to daily public censure and potential violence by living openly as a gay man suggests a strength that other, more dignified characters lack; Thorpe explaining that one of his reasons for choosing Scott was that he seemed unlikely to be violent towards him, as other one-night stands often were; a conservative peer who is co-sponsoring the bill to decriminalize homosexuality painfully reminiscing about his brother's death by suicide--all combine to make the point that while this particular story may be a silly one, the pain and injustice that underlie it are real, and reverberate to this day.
  
  
• Marvel's Cloak & Dagger - Five years into Marvel's TV project, it's possible to identify three distinct schools.  There are the ABC shows, perpetually hobbled by the need to conform to the network TV model without the skill to pull it off in an entertaining way; they occasionally throw up good material (the first season of Agent Carter, mainly), but for the most part aren't worth your time and attention.  There are the Netflix shows, incredibly exciting when they first appeared but very quick to squander their most interesting ideas (not to mention their potential for political storytelling).  And in the last year, we've gotten the Freeform shows (formerly known as ABC Family, Freeform is an ABC-owned channel for youth-oriented material).  These tend to be characterized by more adventurous visuals and an emphasis on real-world class issues that extends to filming in poor and sometimes dilapidated locations, something that hardly any other MCU product attempts.  But they also tend to wallow in soap-opera storylines to the detriment of their ostensible superhero premise.  No sooner did we bid farewell to Runaways--which started out like gangbusters only to stall due to its unwillingness to actually let its title characters run away--than the channel has released Cloak & Dagger, which demonstrates the same frustrating combination of promise and glacial plotting.
  
  The Cloak and Dagger of the title are Tyrone (Aubrey Joseph) and Tandy (Olivia Holt), two teenagers who, as we learn in the pilot but as they are still figuring out, were granted superpowers by the same industrial accident, and who have a mysterious connection that they don't entirely understand.  The show spends a lot of time on their respective, complex situations.  Tyrone is the surviving child of an upwardly-mobile family whose parents, still scarred by the shooting death of his older brother, are frantic for him to buckle down and fly straight, and terrified that this won't be enough to protect him from a world that frequently victimizes young black men.  Tandy is living on the streets, running scams on rich college students, occasionally dropping in on her alcoholic mother, who is still trying to prove that the accident that killed Tandy's father (the same one that gave her and Tyrone their powers) wasn't his fault.  These are both well-drawn settings, and the fact that the show takes its time to introduce us to them, as well as the fact that it's drawing out our understanding of Tyrone and Tandy's powers, is not unjustifiable in itself.  What's less understandable is the show's reluctance to put its two leads together, instead pairing them with other characters who are obviously less important because their names aren't in the title.  This is particularly true of the two leads' respective alternate love interests--Tandy's devoted boyfriend Liam (Carl Lundstedt), and Evita (Noëlle Renée Bercy), a girl in Tyrone's school who makes her interest in him clear.  Both are decent characters, but since it's clear that they are merely hurdles on the path to Tyrone and Tandy getting together, it's hard not to resent the time spent with them.
  
  Nevertheless, there are things in Cloak & Dagger that make me think it's worth sticking with.  The show makes much of its New Orleans setting, not only using it to comment on race, racist policing, and corporate negligence, but drawing on its history for its own storytelling.  In a dream sequence in the third episode, Tyrone is seen dressed like an 18th century chevalier, which is perfect for a New Orleans story but not something you see in most superhero shows.  Another interesting note is the show's use of religious imagery.  Tyrone goes to a Catholic school and has a mentor in one of the priests who teach there, who challenges him to use faith to overcome his anger over his brother's death.  Tandy squats in an abandoned church and is drawn to images of angels.  Most gratifying given the show's setting, voodoo has already been introduced into the show's cosmology, with Tyrone visiting a priestess who sends him on a vision quest (this is actually one of the better uses to which the show puts Evita's character, who is one of the vectors through which Tyrone explores black New Orleans culture; the other is his father, a former Mardi Gras Indian).  These aren't elements that have shown up in other MCU shows, and they offer the possibility that Cloak & Dagger will be able to strike its own path rather than following a familiar template.  But for that promise to be realized, the show's plotting need to kick into gear.
  
  
• Picnic at Hanging Rock - I haven't read the 1967 Joan Lindsay novel on which this miniseries is based, nor watched the 1975 Peter Weir film adaptation which is generally considered to be a masterpiece.  I did, however, know the basic details of the plot (and, apparently like a lot of other people, made the mistake of assuming that it was based on a real event).  On a summer afternoon in 1900 Australia, a group of girls from a rural finishing school go on a picnic at Hanging Rock, a magnificent natural rock formation.  Three of the girls and one of the teachers go exploring and don't return.  One is rescued after a few days, and the others are never seen again.  The investigation into the disappearance dredges up the secrets of the school's imperious headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard (Natalie Dormer), and stirs up currents of tension and resentment among the school's remaining students and teachers.
  
  The Victorian girls' boarding school as a hotbed of repression, hysteria, and overheated imagination is practically a cliché, especially in the Gothic genre to which Picnic at Hanging Rock clearly belongs.  But the Australian setting puts its own spin on the proceedings.  The miniseries' visuals stress the overpowering, baking sun.  One can almost feel the late summer heat wafting through the screen.  Victorian ideas of propriety are, of course, completely unsuited to this setting, and much is made of the way the girls are confined by their dress--being permitted to remove their gloves is depicted as an act of liberation.  The sound design, as well, often overpowers the characters' dialogue with jangling, modern music, or sounds of nature and of animals which are foreign to the characters' European-trained expectations (one of the missing girls complains that the Australian scenery is "wrong" and needs taming).  The soundtrack reminded me of a similar approach in the recently-concluded The Terror, a show I didn't get around to writing about, but which is on my list as one of the best TV series of 2018.  Despite taking place in very different parts of the world, both stories are ultimately about Victorians encroaching on an alien landscape and trying to remake it in their image, only to end up swallowed up by it.  Though the miniseries touches only lightly on the significance of Hanging Rock to Indigenous Australians, there is a constant suggestion that the rock is a place of power, and that the missing women have somehow plugged into it.
  
  At the same time, Picnic at Hanging Rock deals with the traditional components of Gothic stories--sexual hysteria, adolescent girls rebelling against their swiftly-approaching womanhood and its attendant limitations, and the vicious, self-imposed trap of female propriety.  Mrs. Appleyard turns out to have a dark past, which she compensates for by playing the correct, respectable matron to the hilt.  She collects damaged, vulnerable women as her students and employees, but it's never clear whether she does this out of genuine fellow-feeling or the desire to have someone to exercise her power over.  Either way, she ends up developing twisted, abusive relationships with all of them, incapable of reaching past her own tragic past and her desire to erase it.  The three girls each have a horror of their looming adulthood--Miranda (Lily Sullivan), the daughter of a rancher, dreams of returning to farm life but knows that she will soon be married off; Marion (Madeleine Madden), the biracial, illegitimate daughter of a rich man, struggles with both her limited future prospects, and her attraction to women; cosmopolitan heiress Irma (Samara Weaving) has money but no real family, and she latches on to the visiting nephew of one of the town's leading families, who in turn is more interested in the stable boy.  Orbiting the three girls is charity case Sarah (Inez Currõ), who fruitlessly tries to combat Mrs. Appleyard's attempts to impose normalcy (and save the reputation of her establishment) after the disappearances.
  
  There's a lot of interesting material, but perhaps not enough to sustain a six-hour miniseries.  Picnic at Hanging Rock drags towards its middle, when it seems that its story is branching out in multiple directions--Sarah's long-lost brother and her years in an orphanage; the school's French mistress's affair with a local businessman; the Bible-thumping deportment teacher's seeming horror at her students' rebelliousness, mingled with her own desire for freedom; even a romance between two of the school's servants--that don't seem to have much to do with one another.  There is perhaps a little too much reliance on wordless flashes to the missing girls in their diaphanous white gowns, too many attempts to create atmosphere that end up coasting on it.  Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a plot-driven story--another thing that most people know about it is that the mystery isn't solved--but nevertheless the miniseries wallows in its plotlessness a little too much, veering off on tangents instead of trying to come to a point.  The ending, despite its openness, is quite powerful, but nevertheless one wishes that the middle were a little more tightly-constructed.

Winter Crop, 2018 Edition

I don't always do reviews of the new TV series of the winter, which seems like a shame when you think about it.  As I've noted for several years in my fall reviews of new network shows, there's hardly anything worth looking for in that arena (always excepting The Good Place), and winter seems to be when the stranger, more interesting material gets released.  This year has been no exception, offering up a new superhero series with an intriguing twist on the concept, a strange science fictional spy story, and a well-made social drama.  I don't know if I'm going to stay in love with all of these shows (three episodes in, I'm starting to lose patience with Counterpart, for example), but they have a hook that the fall's carefully samey procedurals don't even try for.

• Black Lightning - There's a scene about halfway through the premiere episode of the CW's latest DC superhero show that really made me sit up, and think that maybe we were about to get a genuinely revolutionary take on this increasingly problematic concept.  Retired superhero turned school principal Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams) has just rescued his daughter from the clutches of a gang boss, in the process causing panic at a nightclub.  Wandering outside the club in a daze, he's discovered by some cops, who immediately train their guns on him and order him to "get [his] black ass on the ground".  Jefferson could comply--as he did earlier in the day when he was pulled over for "fitting the description" of a liquor store robber--and his powers mean that he isn't in any immediate danger.  Nevertheless, a long litany of frustration, including from the earlier run-in with the police, takes its toll, and he clenches his fists and lets fly with his electric powers, leaving the cops alive but on the ground as he power-walks away.
  
  It's a scene that feels important for two reasons.  First, because of how rarely black heroes--and black superheroes in particular--are allowed to express anger, much less allow themselves to be overcome by it.  Think, for example, of the MCU's black heroes--Falcon, War Machine, Luke Cage, and Black Panther--and how often they're positioned as the level-headed, or cheerful, counterpoint to a hotheaded or angsty white hero.  Even as heroes of their own stories, these characters are expected to proceed with calm deliberation, and are rarely allowed to express rage or frustration--in Civil War, T'challa is seeking justice for the recent murder of his father, and yet he spends the film acting cool and collected, while Captain America and Iron Man's every temper tantrum is indulged and excused.  For Black Lightning to allow its titular hero to feel rage--to make that expression of rage our introduction to him as a person with powers--feels like a thesis statement, as well as a deliberate rebuke to the stereotype of the angry black man.
  
  Second, this scene feels important because it introduces, very early on, the idea that the police are not Jefferson's allies, in either of his guises.  As we learn in the same episode, the police department of Freeland, where the show takes place, has had a warrant for Black Lightning's arrest for a decade, even though other, white superheroes in the show's world have been allowed to proceed with relative impunity.  Despite centering around vigilantes, superhero stories tend to be deeply suspicious of characters who reject or act against the existing social order, and especially if they're reacting to prejudice or oppression.  But as I've written in the past, a story about an African-American superhero offers more opportunities to debate the necessity of extra-legal violence than shows like Daredevil or The Punisher.  It's an ambivalence embodied by Jefferson himself.  In his civilian life, he tries to teach his students to reject violence and pursue their dreams by excelling at school and giving back to their community, and he makes a compelling argument that he's done more good in this role than he ever did as Black Lightning.  But at the same time, Jefferson is drawn to violence, frustrated not just by police brutality (actually a secondary element in the show thus far, which generally depicts the police as well-meaning but overmatched) but by the gangs running roughshod over Freeland.  He makes an equally compelling argument that Black Lightning represents the community fighting back against the indifference, impotence, and malice that have blighted it.  In only a few episodes, the show repeatedly complicates the question of what role violence should play in its characters' lives, as when a gang boss informs a young boy that the system Jefferson is teaching him to participate in is irreparably biased against black people, and then tells our hero "you teach them your way; I'll teach them mine".
  
  Beyond all this heavy material, Black Lightning is also a CW superhero show.  Jefferson has an ex-wife, Lynn (Christine Adams), who believes that his vigilantism constituted an addiction, and is heartbroken when the possibility of a reconciliation between them is scotched by his choice to once again don his supersuit.  His daugthers, Jennifer and Anissa (China Anne McClain and Nafessa Williams), are respectively a teenager struggling with the burden of her father and community's expectations, and a young woman just discovering that she has superpowers herself (Anissa is also gay and in a relationship with a woman, which is not even that unusual for the CW's DC shows except that in this case both partners are women of color).  The opening episodes introduce a seasonal villain, Tobias (Marvin "Krondon" Jones III), with connections to Jefferson's family.  And the action scenes are vivid, thrilling, and most of all set themselves apart by positing a hero who is experienced and sure of himself.  The stage is set, therefore, for a superhero story that is satisfying and pushes just a tiny but necessary bit against this genre's blindspots when it comes to race and social justice.  I'm very interested to see what comes next.
  
  
• Counterpart - Starz's new spy-fi show is one of those series that holds its cards close to its chest, trusting that weirdness and suggestion will carry a curious audience along despite the opacity of its storytelling.  In the era of Peak TV, this can be a frustrating approach.  There's far too much excellent material vying for our time and attention to justify any single show taking too long to stake its claim, at least at the level of making it clear what kind of story it's trying to tell.  But sometimes, the combination of an intriguing premise, a good cast, and high-quality execution will give a show the benefit of the doubt.  Counterpart has all three.  Set in a German city (and making much of its European location and the availability of actors of various backgrounds) it centers on Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons) a low-level worker at a mysterious, secretive intelligence agency.  Howard's job consists of reading and receiving codewords from another operative separated from him by a glass divider, and Counterpart makes much of the bureaucratized weirdness of this setup, at once sinister and tedious.  Spurred by a recent accident experienced by his wife Emily (Olivia Williams), who lingers in a coma, a restless Howard tries to advance in his organization's hierarchy, at the the same time as a development in the upper levels of that organization suddenly makes him integral to their plans.  Called to a mysterious meeting, Howard meets another version of himself, and is informed that the purpose of his organization is to conceal the existence of, and maintain diplomatic relations with, a parallel universe.  The alternate Howard--who turns out to be high-ranking spy--reveals that a faction within his organization is pushing for a violent incursion into our universe, and he's crossed over to prevent this.  For some reason, and despite realizing that he is merely an office drone, he wants our Howard along for the ride.
  
  There is, quite obviously, a lot that remains unclear about this premise, down to very practical questions such as how there could be competing spy networks in the two universes if the only access point between them is so closely guarded on both sides that the alternate Howard can only come over for a set number of hours.  It still remains to be seen whether this is all part of a carefully thought-out design that the show hasn't yet revealed, or just the writers relying on the tropes of Cold War spy stories to create the impression of depth and sophistication where none exist.  What keeps me interested in Counterpart, therefore, is less the show itself and more all the other works it reminds me of.  Several reviewers have mentioned the combination of Fringe and Le Carré, but the idea of two worlds existing side by side is executed in a way that also reminds me of Miéville's The City & The City, and the premise of a small cog in gigantic and seemingly irrational spy machine is reminiscent of Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe books.  Like these books and shows, Counterpart has been very good at capturing small moments of weirdness that make its world feel real and lived in, such as the two Howards remarking on their choice to wear the same shirt, a woman seeing her alternate and responding with hysterical laughter, or our world's chief diplomat (Richard Schiff) trading for things like the locations of oil fields that the other side has surveyed.
  
  In its interactions between the Howards, too, Counterpart suggests a greater complexity than it has thus far shown.  Despite the obvious zero/hero contrast between the two men, the show very quickly makes the point that the real difference between them is that our Howard is kind.  He gives flowers to the nurses visiting his wife, and goes out of his way to make the other Howard feel welcome in his home.  The other Howard initially reacts with exasperation, but you can see him responding to this softer, better version of himself--which has its payoff when we realize that in the alternate world, Howard and Emily are divorced and at odds professionally.  Basically, all I have right now to keep me going with Counterpart are moments, and the suggestion that it might know where it's going.  But it's a sufficiently out-there idea, and sufficiently well-executed, that for now this is enough.
  
  
• The Chi - Lena Waithe came off the second season of Master of None a newly-minted superstar, having penned the touching, autobiographical "Thanksgiving", about her character's gradual coming out over successive Thanksgivings, and her family's slow acceptance of her sexuality and partner.  Giving Waithe her own TV show was an obvious next step, but the result--though impressive--isn't what "Thanksgiving" might lead you to expect.  Set in a poor, black neighborhood in Chicago's South Side, The Chi kicks off with a murder, and follows a wide cast of characters along multiple storylines.  Aging hustler Ronnie (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is stunned by the murder of his step-son, who the police assume was involved in drugs despite his parents' conviction that there is more to the story.  Upwardly mobile chef Brandon (Jason Mitchell) is equally shaken by the murder of his younger brother soon afterwards, and begins an investigation into it despite his girlfriend's demands that he leave it to the police.  Grade schooler Kevin (Alex R. Hibbert) witnesses the second murder, and finds himself caught between Ronnie and Brandon and fearing for his life.  And immature teenager Emmett (Jacob Latimore) is forced to take responsibility for the first time in his life when an ex leaves their toddler son in his care, and may be drifting into illegal ways of getting the money he now needs.
  
  The show that The Chi most strongly reminds me of in its first few episodes is Treme, not just because they both have a large cast of characters and take place in a small, poor, and predominantly black neighborhoods, but because both are characterized by a profound kindness and generosity towards their characters.  In the opening episode, Ronnie does something stupid and unforgivable, but despite our anger at him, it's impossible not to still see him as a human being, struggling with terrible pain even as he inflicts it on others.  In the same way, it's impossible not to root for Emmett as he takes tiny steps towards maturity, even though on the whole he remains a selfish man who expects his mother and girlfriends to pick up his slack.  Waithe has spoken about her desire to depict black men as fully human and worthy of sympathy, and this is obvious in the way that she refuses to condemn any of her characters, even when they do deeply unsympathetic things.  (A less encouraging outcome of this focus is that women on the show seem to be relegated to the roles of mothers, girlfriends, and baby-mamas, and rarely given the space or the opportunity to develop their inner lives as the men are.)
  
  It's interesting to compare The Chi's approach to its setting and premise to Black Lightning.  The CW show draws very broad lines between heroes and villains, depicting its setting as one in which law-abiding people are preyed on by gangs and drug dealers.  On The Chi, the lines are significantly more blurred, repeatedly making the point that all its characters exist at some intersection between legal and illegal, respectable and degraded--and that it is very easy to slip back and forth between these states.  Brandon, for example, may be from the neighborhood and attuned to its ideas of extra-legal justice, but he's not very street-smart, botching an attempt to buy a gun, and failing to read obvious signs of danger from the people around him.  This, too, feels like part of Waithe's project with the show, insisting that characters who commit crimes are not necessarily hardened criminals, and that in other walks of their lives they can be thoughtful, respectful, and vulnerable.  This can sometimes lean a little too far in the direction of excusing violent, anti-social behavior--again, especially as regards the treatment of women--but on the whole, I'm glad that The Chi is making its statement.  It's not so much that I think this is a better approach than Black Lightning's as that I find it terribly exciting that both shows can exist at the same time, exploring different attitudes to similar issues.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2017 Edition

I've been doing these fall TV reviews for more than a decade, and every year they feel less relevant, as either a guide to shows that people might like to watch or a commentary on the state of TV.  It's not that I believe that network TV is no longer capable of producing worthwhile, exciting fare--after all, my favorite show currently airing, whose second season is somehow managing to top even its stellar first one, is a network sitcom.  But pretty much everything the networks have trotted out this fall, good and bad, has felt inessential, like retreads of old ideas and trends that aren't really worth taking the time to talk about.  My focus in this post, then, is on the one thing that makes this fall unusual--the fact that in the space of a month, we've seen the premieres of four different SF shows.  Not all of them are good, but their subject matter means that all of them are sufficiently far from the standard network template that I can find something to say about them.

• The Orville - By now you've probably heard that Seth MacFarlane's new space-set show is not, as you might expect from its description, appearance, and MacFarlane's involvement, a parody of Star Trek, but an hour-long adventure show that is entirely earnest in its use of Star Trek's tropes and conventions.  This, however, doesn't even come close to capturing the strangeness, and the awkwardness, of what MacFarlane has produced with The Orville.  Watching it feels like what I imagine it would be like if you could follow along and watch--but never participate--in someone else's not-very-sophisticated but extremely well-funded Star Trek LARP.  As a television show, The Orville is bad--the storytelling is slow and dull, the dialogue is stilted and full of infodumps (which none of the actors know how to deliver), the characters are barely there--but one feels almost embarrassed to point this out, as if by doing so you're interrupting someone else's fun.  In all my years of watching way too much TV, I have never encountered a show that gave off so pronounced an impression of being completely uninterested in me or any other member of the audience, of existing solely so that its creator--MacFarlane, as Ed Mercer, the newly-minted captain of the titular ship--could cosplay in his favorite fictional universe.
  
  As a Star Trek fan myself, this is an impulse that I might be expected to sympathize with.  But one of the very first things The Orville reveals, once you get past the strangeness of its project, is how shallow MacFarlane's take on Star Trek actually is.  Oh, the look is all there--the costumes, cityscapes, and spaceships all look exactly like what you'd get if you took the aesthetic of The Next Generation and updated it to keep up with 2017 fashions and production values--and the terms are all easily recognizable--instead of the Federation you've got the Union; instead of Klingons you've got a species whose name I didn't even bother to learn, but who cares, they're Klingons.  And in interviews, MacFarlane has spoken about his desire to return to the "optimistic" type of space exploration stories that Star Trek specialized in.  But the actual stories showing up on screen contain none of the depth or wit that made Star Trek actually good, and the prevailing emotion in the show is less optimism than blandness.  Star Trek has a reputation for being sterile, for ignoring the real messiness of human life and relationships in its zeal to depict a future in which so many (but by no means all) of the sources of human misery had been eliminated.  Leaving aside for a moment whether that's an accurate perception, The Orville's solution to this alleged problem only reveals what a depth of emotion there was in the series it takes off from, and how insufficient MacFarlane's "modernized" take on it is.  The characters on The Orville aren't messy and human; they're shallow and immature.  And not even in fun ways--if the show were more strongly comedic, it might be possible to forgive the fact that its characterization comes down to having the cast speak in 21st century slang and make ever-so-slightly risque jokes.  But given its earnest tone, the thinness of its stories and character arcs is simply unforgivable.
  
  Instead of relying on humor, The Orville cadges storylines from both its obvious inspiration and real life--the second episode borrows from several top-notch Star Trek episodes when it reveals the existence of an alien zoo where sentient species are kept as displays; the third episode revolves around a female baby born to an all-male species, whose parents want to give her gender reassignment surgery.  But the handling of these ideas is invariably shallow, dull, and terrified of controversy--in the third episode, MacFarlane and his writers somehow manage to go a whole hour without ever mentioning the existence of intersex humans, much less suggesting that in The Orville's idealized future, such people might be considered unremarkable.  A similar shallowness afflicts the characters' relationships, the most important one of which is between Ed and his ex-wife, Kelly (Adrianne Palicki, who deserves so much better than this), who cheated on him and is now trying to make amends by helping to put his career, derailed by their divorce, back on track by serving as his second-in-command.  It's tempting to roll your eyes at such a hoary premise, but it might have been better if The Orville were wall-to-wall ex-wife jokes.  Instead, it plays the relationship between Ed and Kelly mostly straight, and in so doing draws attention to the fact that neither one of them behaves like anything resembling a human being, much less one wracked by the kind of deep feelings you'd expect the breakdown of a marriage following infidelity to arouse.  There's the slightest uptick in drama in the third episode, when we witness the conflict between the alien parents who disagree over whether to "conform" their female child, but still not at the level of getting us to care about these people, one of whom is a series regular.  I can almost sympathize with MacFarlane's desire to have another show like Star Trek on the air, but he's so bad at making a version of Star Trek that realizes why that show was special that he might as well not have bothered.
  
  
• Star Trek: Discovery - An additional reason to resent the existence of The Orville is that it has exposed a surprisingly wide seam in Star Trek fandom who, like MacFarlane, seem to think that Star Trek's appeal begins and ends with nostalgia.  These are the people who tend to slag off the most recent addition to the actual Star Trek canon, Discovery, while claiming that The Orville represents "real" Star Trek.  Which is probably making me a lot more partial to Discovery than the show currently deserves.  Taken on its own merits, Discovery is a frustrating but fascinating mix of good and bad, Trek and not-Trek.  But what I appreciate about it is that, even in its worst moments, there is a palpable sense that the people creating it are trying to move Star Trek forward, both as an idea and a work of television.  Not everything they're doing works, and given how withholding the show's storytelling is, even four episodes in, it'll probably take me until the end of the season to decide where I come down on it.  But the idea that it is necessary to grow and change in order to keep telling a story about the infinite possibilities of the future is the most quintessentially Star Trek thing imaginable, so in that sense at least, Discovery is on the right track.
  
  Perhaps the most disorienting--and at the moment, un-Star Trek-like--thing about Discovery is that it's the story of a person, not a ship or a place.  Heroine Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) quickly goes from rising star in the Starfleet ranks to mutineer to a press-ganged crewmember on the titular ship, whose captain, Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) is conducting a mysterious and probably ill-fated experiment in new propulsion systems, and whose ship is filled with secrets and mysteries.  It's not how Star Trek is supposed to work--the ship is always supposed to be home; the crew, even if they disagree, are always supposed to be allies--and, especially for fans traumatized by the recent movies' tendency to throw every idea and principle that made Star Trek what it was out the window in service of a generic action plot and an unearned hero narrative, it's a worrying decision.  What keeps me feeling hopeful about Discovery is mainly Michael herself, who is a wonderful blend of intellect and temper, calm reasoning and self-destructive urges.  The badass/fuckup combination that failed so catastrophically with NuKirk works wonderfully here, mainly because the writing and the performance combine to create the impression that Michael is always thinking, always questioning, genuinely curious about her surroundings and genuinely thoughtful in her choices--even the bad ones.  If she's not quite the Hornblower-esque figure that the original Kirk was, she's a fascinating modern variation on it--not least for being a black woman.
  
  The rest of the Discovery crew are still being revealed, but there's a similar complexity to some of the ones we've already met.  Commander Saru (Doug Jones), a member of an alien race who are congenitally fearful and pessimistic, but who is also decent and kind; Lieutenant Stamets (Anthony Rapp), a scientist who is caught between elation and disgust that the military are fast-tracking his project; Cadet Tilly (Mary Wiseman), Michael's roommate who appears to have some sort of anxiety disorder, but who is also ambitious, and willing to learn even from an unlikely source like Michael.  They all feel like people with their own points of view, and more importantly for a Star Trek context, like people who are used to looking at the universe like a puzzle, not an obstacle course.  There are other aspects of the show that feel more conventional, more like the action-adventure direction that the movies took--Lorca and the suggestion that he's a villain; his mean-tempered chief of security Commander Landry (Rekha Sharma); most of all, the show's take on the Klingons, who have so much less personality and individuality than they did in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.  As I've said, I probably won't know how I feel about Discovery until at least the end of the first season.  But what I do know is that there isn't another character like Michael Burnham on TV right now, nor another story that gives her the opportunity to be a badass, a scientist, and a political thinker.  That, to me, feels like Star Trek.
  
  
• The Gifted - Fox's second X-Men series is a great deal less trippy and surreal than Legion, but has essentially the same premise--mutants fleeing for their lives and freedom from sinister government agencies.  The more conventional style and structure allows The Gifted to be more political, though I'm reserving judgment on how successfully.  In a world where draconian laws allow the government to detain and intern mutants, a middle class couple discover that their children have abilities, and go on the run, teaming up with the mutant underground.  The twist is that the family's father, Reed Strucker (Stephen Moyer) is a lawyer for the government whose job is to criminalize and prosecute mutants.  In fairness, The Gifted seems aware of the inherent problems of focusing its story about oppression on a former oppressor, who only realizes his actions were wrong when they affect his own family.  Already in the first episode there is evidence of subtle criticism of Reed and his wife Kate (Amy Acker, once again being unimaginatively asked to play weepy and overwhelmed), who are the kind of people who pride themselves on being decent and law-abiding, but who, when push comes to shove, genuinely don't seem to believe that the laws should apply to them.  An early scene sees Reed demand severe treatment of students who have bullied his son by, ironically enough, bullying one of his teachers, and when the scary Sentinel Services come to take away the Strucker children after an incident at their school, Kate, who had previously told Reed that he is "keeping us safe" from mutants, flatly denies that the government has any right to take her kids.
  
  It's still possible that The Gifted means for us to see this behavior as uncomplicatedly heroic, and not to notice the Struckers' privileged habits of thought (though the second episode sees Kate being confronted with the fact that she didn't care about how badly mutants were being mistreated until she realized her children were mutants).  But an additional way in which the show addresses its potential problems is by not focusing exclusively on Reed and Kate.  Equal time is given to the Strucker children, Lauren and Andy (Natalie Alyn Lind and Percy Hynes White), who have a nice big sister-little brother rapport, and who clearly don't entirely trust their parents--one of the best scenes in the pilot comes when Lauren reveals that she's been hiding her mutant abilities for three years because she didn't know how Reed and Kate would react.  The mutant underground are also given their own storyline, and though I could wish that the show were told more strongly from their point of view (not least because the underground is a great deal more diverse than the lily-white Strucker family), it doesn't treat them as a means to Reed's ends, nor as helpless victims who need him to save them.  A lot depends on how The Gifted will develop its story going forward--there's a lot of potential for the show to be a story about a racist who Learns Better, and by this point we should all be able to look around and see that it doesn't work that way.  But if the show continues to challenge Reed and Kate on their privilege, and to develop the storylines of the kids and the other mutants, it might end up having something interesting to say about its extremely familiar premise.
  
  
• Marvel's Inhumans - There's probably nothing I can say at this stage that will add to the torrent of scorn that has rained down on Marvel TV's latest effort.  The only thing I can say is that it's all deserved.  Inhumans is a genuinely awful show: poorly written, indifferently acted, and with almost no characters that anyone could care about or be interested in.  What I will say is that I was a little surprised by this failure.  Scott Buck's last tour of duty with Marvel, Iron Fist, was pretty bad in its own right (though, amazingly, still better than Inhumans), but the one thing it got right was the twisted 1% family drama of the Meachums, Danny Rand's business partners.  Given that the one thing I kept hearing about the Inhumans was that they were a superpowered Dynasty, Buck seemed like the perfect fit.  And yet for some reason, he seems to have misplaced the instincts he had for that kind of soap opera storytelling when it came time to write Inhumans, trying to sell the show as a straightforward story of good versus evil, even as the actual characters and premise he presents completely fail to earn those designations.
  
  Inhumans is set in the secret city of Attilan on the Moon, where the part-alien title characters live in a society governed by a rigid caste system.  At puberty, young Inhumans are exposed to Terrigen Mist, which either transforms them and gives them powers, or leaves them human.  The latter group are then sent to toil in the mines, while the former live like kings--literally, as our heroes Black Bolt and Medusa (Anson Mount and Serinda Swan) rule over Attilan along with the rest of the royal family.  The obvious perversity of this arrangement is recognized only by Black Bolt's brother, Maximus (Iwan Rheon), who orchestrates a palace coup and gains the people's support by promising them new living space on Earth.  In other words, at the very least Inhumans should be a twisty tale of intrigue and double-crosses where no one is purely good or bad (though frankly, the only reason not to be completely on Maximus's side is that he keeps killing people who get in his way).  Instead, the show presents Black Bolt, Medusa, and their supporters as completely in the right, and Maximus's actions as completely evil, and leaves no space for the kind of political machinations its premise clearly demands.
  
  Of the cast, only Rheon and Swan seem to realize that they should be playing entitled, arrogant aristocrats, whose appeal comes not from being likable but from total self-possession.  Even they, however, can't do much with the story or characters they've been given.  The show fares much worse with Black Bolt, who can't speak because his voice has terrible concussive properties.  Seemingly no thought has been given to how to convey the personality of a completely silent character, and so Maximus's accusation that Black Bolt is passive and unwilling to plan for the future end up carrying a lot of weight, further cementing the feeling that neither he nor his family deserve to win this particular game of thrones.  One imagines that, like The Gifted, the arc of this story will be for the "good" Inhuman characters to take the opportunity of having been humbled in order to Learn Better and then remake Inhuman society into a more equal place.  But, even if the execution so far were not so very bad, that feels like a waste of a good premise.  There's nothing wrong with a twisty soap opera, and the world of Marvel is obviously a rich setting for one.  Not everything needs to be about heroes and villains.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2016 Edition, Part 2

This year's fall pilot season is shaping up to be rather muted.  Which, to be fair, is an improvement on the dreck of previous years, but also not much to talk about.  It probably tells you all need to know about the fall pilots of 2016 that there are two different time travel shows--Timeless and Frequency--and neither of them are worth saying anything about.  Nevertheless, here are a few series, good and bad, that I thought were interesting enough to write about, even if I'm not sure I'll be sticking with all of them.

• No Tomorrow - Over the last few years, I've come to trust the CW and its programming instincts.  Not only does it air some of my favorite shows--iZombie, the smartest superhero show on TV; Jane the Virgin, still going strong and finding real drama at the heart of cheesy soap opera plot twists; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, one of the funniest, most original, most heartbreaking shows in existence--but its DC superhero block is easily the most rock-solid, self-assured iteration on the genre on either the small or big screen (and I say that as someone who has given up on The Flash in disgust, and might let go of Arrow by the end of the year).  So I came to No Tomorrow with a lot of goodwill.  Yes, the premise is absurd--high-strung Evie (Tori Anderson) meets her dream guy, Xavier (Joshua Sasse), falling in love as much with his free spirit and determination to seize the day as with his rugged good looks, only to learn that he genuinely believes that the Earth is going to be destroyed by an asteroid in eight months.  But the CW has made meaty, emotionally resonant fare out of even sillier (not to mention potentially offensive) premises, so I was willing to let No Tomorrow win me over.  In the end, what I've found is both less ridiculous, and less promising, than I'd hoped.
  
  Sasse and Anderson are both extremely charming, and do a great job of selling their nascent relationship as something that is based not only on attraction and zaniness, but genuine connection.  No Tomorrow has the good sense not to hang its every plot twist on Xavier's belief in the coming apocalypse, and the challenges that he and Evie face in their relationship are often as much about their differing lifestyles, or her fluctuating comfort levels with his carpe diem worldview, as they are about this fundamental disagreement.  At its best moments, No Tomorrow is about building a relationship with someone who is very different from you, whose differences are sometimes intriguing but just as often concerning (to its credit, the show faces head-on the very real possibility that Xavier might be dangerous or unhinged, and has Evie and her friends investigate this possibility with all due seriousness).  But it lacks the core of emotion that has made Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend--both shows that are ultimately about very serious things, such as family, or dealing with mental illness--so compelling.  There doesn't seem to be as much beneath the surface of No Tomorrow's quirkiness as there is in those shows, and it's hard to imagine the show finding more than a few notes in its premise, or in Evie and Xavier's relationship.  For the time being, those notes are still quite enjoyable--especially since the show is wisely developing Evie and Xavier's worlds, introducing friends, coworkers, and family members for them to interact with--but I doubt that No Tomorrow will join the pantheon of weird-yet-oddly-wonderful CW shows.
  
  
• Pitch - In the first installment of this year's fall show reviews, I wrote about the dreadful This Is Us.  As several commenters on twitter pointed out, you can feel Aaron Sorkin's influence on that series, particularly its fondness for overheated speeches and general air of self-satisfaction.  Pitch feels like good quasi-Sorkin to This Is Us's bad quasi-Sorkin.  Like the earlier show (with whom it shares a creator, Dan Fogelman), it is fond of melodrama and speechifying.  But unlike This Is Us, Pitch has a premise that is semi-plausible and convincing, characters who are compelling rather than off-putting, and, most importantly, the ability to reach for something raw and real beneath its stylized, self-conscious surface.  The show begins with rookie Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury) taking her place as the first woman in major league baseball, and charts her journey in the clubhouse, and as a new national icon to women and girls.  Along for the ride are Ginny's agent Amelia Slater (Ali Larter), eager to push her charge to stardom, fading player Mike Lawson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), coach Al Luongo (Dan Lauria), and general manager Oscar Arguella (Mark Consuelos).
  
  My biggest issue with Pitch is that it veers unpromisingly between the most blatant sports-movie clichés--in the pilot episode, Ginny chokes during her first game, and is then inspired to make a comeback by an inspirational speech from Mike--and the most obsessive kind of inside baseball details that I have trouble parsing, much less caring about.  What keeps the show together despite these plotting issues are its characters, and even more than that, the relationships they forge--the growing friendship and mutual appreciation between Mike and Ginny, the surprisingly mature romance between Mike and Amelia, and the political machinations between Al, Oscar, and the team management.  But Pitch wants to be more than a workplace drama--it wants to comment about the intersection between entertainment, celebrity, gender, and race--and at this it is only intermittently successful.  An early episode in which Ginny must navigate an insensitive but ultimately innocuous comment from Al, a heavily-publicized case of locker-room sexual assault, and the needs of her own career, makes a powerful point about the constant pitfalls that lie before her as a trailblazer, a celebrity, and an athlete.  But there doesn't seem to be much life in these topics--four episodes into the series, it's already repeating points, about the weight of Ginny's celebrity, the difficulty of her relationship with her overbearing father, or Mike's ambivalence about his waning career.  There are a lot of great ingredients that go into Pitch, but the stew that they make up is already losing its flavor, struggling to justify itself as a story rather than an idea.
  
  
• Westworld - Easily the most-anticipated new series of the fall, the consensus that has already formed around HBO's latest foray into genre is that it represents the channel's attempts to grapple with its own reputation for prurient violence, particularly violence against women (see Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker, and Aaron Bady in The Los Angeles Review of Books).  You can see how that consensus has formed--Westworld builds on the 1973 movie to imagine a lush and impeccably-detailed theme park in which customers pay lavishly to indulge their every fantasy, which almost inevitably seem to involve murder, mayhem, and of course rape.  The metaphor for how HBO's pretensions to highbrow entertainment ultimately rest on the sumptuously-filmed and -costumed violence of Game of Thrones, True Detective, and The Night Of pretty much writes itself.  For myself, I'd like to believe that there's more to Westworld than this glib reading, first because I simply do not believe that anyone at HBO possesses this level of self-awareness--this is, after all, the channel whose executives were genuinely taken aback, in the year 2016, by the idea that their shows had become synonymous with violence against women--and second because it's by far the least interesting avenue of story the show could take.
  
  If you want to read Westworld as a meta-commentary about storytelling (and to be clear, I agree that there's a thread of this running through the show, though to my mind it's far from the central one), you also have to face up to how tedious and unimaginative the stories-within-the-story are.  Leaving aside the questionable notion of anyone spending money to play cowboys and Indians anymore, the stories that take place within Westworld, in which the theme park's guests are invited to track down fugitives, go on treasure hunts, or just fool around with prostitutes, simply don't seem worth the price of admission.  They also take it as a given that the guests' fantasy life is thoroughly conventional (not to mention defaulting to the straight male gaze).  Everyone, we're told, wants to rape the comely, innocent rancher's daughter Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood)--this is literally the purpose of her existence in the park.  No one seems interested in raping her paramour, the stalwart Teddy (James Marsden), or, indeed, in having a consensual threesome.
  
  If Westworld is of any interest to me, it is because of the parallel story about the robot characters' (known as "hosts") growing awakening into sentience, and into an awareness of the brutality to which they've been repeatedly subjected.  That the show comes from Person of Interest creator Jonathan Nolan is the main reason I'm hopeful that it will tell such a story well and in interesting ways, but so far Westworld is being frustratingly slow in building up towards it.  Each of the four aired episodes advances multiple plotlines only fractionally, trusting the audience to follow along in hopes of an interesting resolution to some of the more opaque questions that the show has been teasing: what is the elaborate new storyline promised by park creator Ford (Anthony Hopkins), and why has he suddenly given the hosts the ability to remember their past lives (and deaths)?  Which, if any, of the park's administrators and technicians are robots themselves?  Who is the Man in Black (Ed Harris), a guest who believes that he is about to unlock the game's "deepest level"?  The result is frustrating, carried along by the show's magnificent production values and some fine performances (Wood is a standout as a being coming into self-awareness who is also, simultaneously, a woman starting to realize her own power in a world ruled by men, but pretty much everyone in the cast is very good), but not yet coalescing into an actual story.  I'm still watching Westworld because I have hope that it will become the story I want it to be--and faith that Nolan is both interested in that story, and capable of pulling it off--but it's not hard to see why so many reviewers are assuming that it amounts to little more than self-reflection.  At this point in its first season, the show still hasn't staked out a claim to being about anything but itself.
  
  
• Class - It's strange to find the BBC, in 2016, getting back in the Doctor Who spin-off business.  It's even stranger for that spin-off to be Class, whose Buffy-esque mixture of genre elements, teen drama, and snarky humor would have seemed derivative and predictable even in the heyday of the NuWho universes's expansion ten years ago.  It's particularly strange that Class comes from the pen of Patrick Ness, whose written novels--particularly the Chaos Walking trilogy--are so original and uncompromising.  In Class, he has instead plumped for the most familiar of tropes--a group of students discover that their school lies on a hellmouth, and must band together to defend the Earth from the alien menaces that emerge from it--and executed them with so little verve that the characters themselves sometimes seem bored with their own story.  There are some original plot points--one of the teenagers is an alien prince, and his slave-cum-bodyguard is masquerading as a teacher--and some nods towards inclusivity--the alien is also gay, and two of the other teenagers are the children of, respectively, Pakistani and Nigerian immigrants, who bond over their shared experience as people of color in a mostly-white environment.  But none of this feels sufficiently fresh to make up for Class's familiarity.  It could simply be that I've aged out of this kind of story, but even kids these days have so many other alternatives if they're looking for something Buffy-inspired--from Teen Wolf to The Vampire Diaries to Doctor Who itself--that it's hard to understand what sort of need Class thinks that it's fulfilling.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2016 Edition

This week has seen the first inklings of the new TV season, as the US networks start trotting out shows in the hopes of success, legitimacy, or even the tiniest bit of attention.  And yet here I am, still talking about some of the shows of summer.  This is partly because, as we've all more or less accepted, network shows just aren't where it's at anymore, and there isn't that much to say about yet another raft of samey procedurals and underbaked high concepts.  So this post covers a British miniseries and a Netflix series, as well as a few network pilots.  Still, I do enjoy this time of year, and I keep hoping that one of these shows will surprise me, so stay tuned for further reports. 

(Not discussed in this post, because there wasn't much to say about them: Designated Survivor, which has an ironclad elevator pitch that I'm not sure it knows what to do with, and Notorious, which seems desperate to be a Shondaland show but actually feels more like a parody of one.  And coming from the other direction, I would have liked to write more about Donald Glover's new FX comedy Atlanta, but the truth is that I'm still not sure what I think about it--it's a really interesting and well made show, but not one I've fully grasped yet)

• Victoria - ITV has been promoting the hell out of this sumptuous miniseries about the early years in the reign of the titular queen.  But while the subject matter--and the presence of former Doctor Who companion Jenna Coleman, wearing an extremely distracting pair of blue contact lenses, in the title role--have an obvious appeal, the more one sees of Victoria, the less persuasive its argument is that there is actually anything here worth watching for.  Victoria takes some liberties with its history, mostly so that it can more easily fit it into the forms of a romantic melodrama--suggesting, for example, that the teenage Victoria was in love with her first PM, Lord Melbourne (Rufus Sewell), when in reality she seems to have viewed him as more of a father figure; or injecting tension over the question of whether Victoria will warm to her future husband Albert (Tom Hughes), when in reality she had known him since their early teens, and was very fond of him from the start.  But as tedious as these choices are, they pale beside the miniseries's real problem--that the more it shows us of Victoria, the less interesting she seems.  It finally becomes clear that while Victoria had tremendous symbolic significance, the actual events of her life were rather boring, with her main accomplishments being that she outlived the rest of her family, and then successfully set up a dynasty.
  
  Victoria tries to get some mileage out of the difficulties that its heroine experiences as a reigning queen--hardly anyone around her believes in her abilities, and her choices and freedoms are constantly being curtailed by people who pay lip service to her title but are clearly more swayed by her gender and youth.  But it constantly bumps up against the problem that the things Victoria wants to do are rarely admirable, or even very difficult--the first episode ends with her pushing through personal sorrow to perform the utterly ceremonial function of reviewing her troops.  And more often, when Victoria tells us that she's being stymied because of her gender, what shows up on screen is a petulant, spoiled child who is determined to get her own way, as in a scene in which her resentment of one of her mother's attendants leads her to subject the woman to what is essentially medical rape.  When, in a later episode, Victoria crows about the fact that she precipitated a constitutional crisis in order to gratify her desire to keep Melbourne in her entourage, it's hard not to wonder whether the miniseries is making a stealth argument for abolishing the monarchy.
  
  Victoria wants us to be on its heroine's side, even when not doing so might have made for a more interesting story.  The most recent episode revolves around the financial negotiations that precede Victoria's marriage to Albert, with the taciturn prince insisting that he be granted a sufficient allowance to be independent of his sovereign wife, and Victoria unable to understand why Albert isn't content to depend on her generosity--as so many wives in his position have had to be.  For a moment, there's the potential to say something interesting about how Victoria, for all her outward demureness, actually relishes her power, and is perfectly happy to prop up unjust, oppressive systems so long as she gets to be the one doing the oppressing.  But the episode is too committed to the epic love story of Victoria and Albert, and ends with Victoria giving up her power for the sake of marital bliss.  That's probably true to life, but in a show that has already proven itself willing to twist history to its needs, it's disappointing how those needs keep taking the story in the most boring, predictable directions.
  
  
• The Get Down - Most of the attention paid to Netflix shows this summer was lavished on the mega-success Stranger Things, leaving Baz Luhrmann's historical-musical-teen-drama to languish in its shadow.  That's a shame, because while Stranger Things was impeccably made and a lot of fun, it was also somewhat hollow.  The Get Down, in contrast, is a mess--of the six episodes in the "half-season" released this summer, only one really works as a piece of storytelling, and the rest are frequently shapeless, self-indulgent, and silly.  But The Get Down also has heart, passion, and a deeply-felt desire to tell its story that I haven't seen in almost any other show this year (with the possible exception of this spring's Underground).  When the show's disparate (and often seemingly contradictory) elements click together, it's like nothing I've ever seen.
  
  Set in the Bronx in the late 70s, The Get Down focuses on three young people: Zeke (Justice Smith), a soft-spoken high school student and burgeoning poet who is being urged towards college and respectability by his family, but who is drawn to the emerging hip hop scene, finding in it a means of expressing his rage and political views; Mylene (Herizen F. Guardiola), the girl of Zeke's dreams, whose own dreams are of disco stardom; and Shaolin (Shameik Moore), a drug dealer and hustler who wants to turn over a new leaf by becoming a DJ.  These are, obviously, blatant stereotypes, but they're brought to vivid, unforgettable life by the young actors, who convey not only passion and determination, but a complex understanding of their situation.  Zeke, for example, is genuinely torn between respectability and the hip-hop life, seeing things to desire and strive for in both of the possibilities before him, and driven by genuine ambition in both directions.  Which is a much more nuanced handling of this type of story than you usually see.  Perhaps more importantly, it feels significant that these character types--familiar, for example, from Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, whose earnest tone The Get Down frequently mirrors--are being played by black and brown people, that they are treated as people who get to dream, and to be exuberant in the pursuit of their dreams.
  
  It's that combination of exuberance and savvy that makes The Get Down fascinating, and that convinces me that it's worth keeping up with despite its flawed beginning.  Alongside its musical numbers and candy-colored tales of kids who just want to sing, the show paints a surprisingly detailed and complicated picture of the political situation in the Bronx during its era.  Jimmy Smits hams it up as a local politician who is trying to amass enough political power to transform the neighborhood, but some of his ideas, about the things that people of color deserve and have been taught to live without, would be revolutionary if they were stated on the news, much less in a show that is essentially a hip hop version of Glee.  And the insight the show offers into the workings of the white political establishment--for example a mayoral candidate who explains that he is hammering at non-violent crimes like graffiti tagging because it plays well to white, middle class voters--is sharp enough to cut.  Alongside shows like Jane the Virgin or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The Get Down is a reminder that sometimes it takes a degraded, "trashy" genre--like the let's-put-on-a-show story--to give a voice to the kind of people that prestige TV tends to forget, and to talk about issues that it tends to ignore.  The Get Down isn't exactly better than something like Stranger Things, but in its choice to use its genre to actually say something, it is infinitely more vital and alive, and if the second half of its season lives up to the promise of its first, it'll truly be something to see.
  
  
• The Good Place - It's often hard to judge a comedy based on only a few episodes, but this difficulty is compounded in the case of Mike Schur's new series.  Three episodes into The Good Place, I'm still not entirely sure what the show is about, and starting to suspect that the story it's trying to tell is actually more complicated and fantastical than it initially lets on.  Which is not to say that what The Good Place starts out as is not complicated and fantastical.  Waking up in a pleasant-looking waiting room, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) is informed that she has died and gone to heaven (or rather, "the good place").  Eleanor's guide, Michael (Ted Danson), explains that he has constructed this particular corner of heaven to be perfectly suited to a few hundred souls who were all the best of the best, and carefully selected to mesh well with each other--including, in Eleanor's case, her soulmate Chidi (William Jackson Harper).  There's just one problem: Eleanor was, in life, a terrible, selfish, manipulative person, and the life of philanthropy and good works that Michael ascribes to her never happened.  Terrified of being sent to "the bad place", Eleanor convinces Chidi to keep her secret, a task complicated by the fact that every time she does something bad, the good place reacts by destabilizing and attacking its inhabitants.  It's left to Eleanor--with the help of Chidi, an ethics professor--to learn how to be good, for the first time in her (after)life.
  
  This is, obviously, a massively convoluted premise and a lot to set up in a couple of 22-minute episodes, especially since revelations about how the good place works, and how it has been malfunctioning, are still coming--at the end of the third episode, for example, we learn that Eleanor is not the only person to arrive at the good place incorrectly.  As a result, it's hard to judge The Good Place as a comedy.  The cast is obviously fantastic, and Bell in particular is great at playing both lovable and nasty, but at the moment The Good Place is more interesting than funny.  Perhaps the show's biggest problem is that, as a story about a person who is learning to be good, The Good Place is often unconvincing.  Eleanor's past as a terrible person, seen through flashbacks, is more cartoonish than horrifying, full of too-blatant flaws like littering or refusing to boycott a coffee shop whose owner sexually harassed employees.  I keep drawing comparisons between how the show draws her, and how a show like Community conveyed the mundane-yet-horrifying depths of Jeff Winger's narcissism, which maintained its grip on him even after he made a genuine effort to change.  The Good Place's idea of goodness feels equally shallow, and perhaps tinged with Hollywood's neoliberal conception of goodness as an individual, rather than communal, trait.  Almost everyone we've met in the good place was a philanthropist or a charity fundraiser or an aid worker--the sort of goodness that is reserved mostly for affluent people, and which is often held up as a reason for why we don't need government or welfare to help people who are in need.
  
  But of course, it seems very possible--even likely--that this is the point.  As more and more flaws reveal themselves in the fabric of the good place, it feels as if the show is deliberately pointing out the limited and limiting nature of its concept of goodness-for example through the character of Tahani (Jameela Jamil), a condescending blowhard who also raised billions for charity.  Schur's previous show, Parks and Recreation, built an elaborate (and often borderline-fantastical) world in its setting of Pawnee, Indiana, and I'm starting to suspect that The Good Place is attempting something even more ambitious, a whole cosmology which the characters have to figure out.  It still remains to be seen whether he and his writers can make a comedy out of a premise like that, but for the moment, The Good Place is one of the most intriguing new shows of the season.
  
  
• This Is Us - The pilot for this it's-all-connected, multi-strand character drama has had some of the most effusive reviews of the fall.  Which leads me to wonder: were all of these reviewers high?  This Is Us's opening episode is one of the most turgid and regrettable hours I've ever spent in front of a TV--to paraphrase a very useful construction, it's a bad writer's idea of what good writing looks like.  Rooted firmly in the genre of family melodrama, This Is Us lacks the one quality that is essential to such stories' success--specificity of character and setting.  And because its writers lack the ability to make their characters and situations feel real and lived-in, they instead opt for absurd, over-the-top plot contrivances, which actually end up being more boring and uninvolving than another show's low-key naturalism--this is a pilot that struggles mightily, and eventually fails, to elicit an emotional reaction from a story about a dead baby.
  
  The first of This Is Us's interlinked storylines involves a young couple, Jack and Rebecca (Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore), who are in the hospital, about to welcome triplets.  It's a rather pointless story whose significance only registers when the pilot delivers its twist ending, but in the meantime it's notable how little personality the show gives Rebecca, even as it emphasizes Jack's concern over the fact that her delivery experiences complications.  In a second storyline, an obese woman named Kate (Chrissy Metz) joins a weight loss group.  Though it's not exactly surprising that the only story network TV can think to give to a fat character revolves around their weight, the sheer hysteria of Kate's storyline is dismaying.  By the end of the pilot, we have learned virtually nothing about her except that she is fat, and that this makes her completely miserable--she seems to have no interests, no hobbies, no friends, no job, nothing going on outside of her obsession with her size.  The one thing we do learn about Kate is that she has a twin brother, Kevin (Justin Hartley), an actor who stars in a dumb sitcom that gets most of its laughs by having him take off his shirt.  Again, it's not surprising that a show this melodramatic would look down on comedy, but the terms in which This Is Us conveys the shallowness of Kevin's show defy belief--everyone working on it, except Kevin, seems to be a talentless hack who cares only about ratings and pleasing the network.  (This condescension is particularly aggravating when one compares This Is Us to something like Jane the Virgin, a comedy that achieves more genuine emotion in any random five minutes than this show manages in its entire pilot.)  When Kevin has an on-set meltdown after a (schlocky and overwrought) dramatic scene is cut, we're meant to think that he's rediscovering his artistic integrity, when really he's just being petty and unprofessional.
  
  Finally, the last plot strand concerns Randall (Sterling K. Brown), a successful and happy family man who tracks down his biological father, William (Ron Cephas Jones), in order to furiously berate him for leaving the infant Randall in a fire station.  While it's understandable that Randall would have complicated feelings towards his father, the fact is that leaving a baby in a fire station isn't hugely different from giving them up for adoption (especially since we learn that Randall was adopted on the very same day that he was abandoned, by a loving and affluent family).  So the depth of Randall's rage, and William's calm acceptance that what he did was unforgivable, feel unearned.  (Nevertheless, this is probably the most successful plotline in the pilot, largely because Brown, late of a transcendent, Emmy-winning turn on The People vs. O.J. Simpson, is the only actor in the cast who manages to imbue his character with anything resembling humanity.)  All of these stories are leading up to a twist that reveals how these characters are connected--though if you know that a twist is coming, it is laughably easy to guess what that connection is--but as soon as that revelation comes, we're left with a question: what is there in this show that's worth watching for?  This Is Us's pilot was written to service its ending, but that ending still leaves us with a bunch of boring characters caught up in unconvincing situations, and absolutely no reason to keep watching.

Gathered Round a Roaring Television, Part 2

It took ten days (all year!) but I'm finally done with the backlog of TV that I let build up over December while I was busy with other things.  And once again, all of these shows, good and bad, are infinitely more interesting than what the networks were cranking out in the fall.  Though it must be said that along with these miniseries and SyFy series, I also watched several network pilots--such as The Colony, Second Chance, and Angel From Hell--that were just as conventional as the now-cancelled dreck they're replacing, and once again not worth talking about.  Is it simply time to give up on the networks producing worthwhile, interesting TV?  Happily, even if that's the case, we still have plenty of other venues supplying us with new shows to discuss.

• Tripped - This cute but inessential Channel 4 series feels like a cross between Sliders and The Wrong Mans.  It follows the by-now extremely familiar template of two lifelong friends, one an unrepentant slacker happy to wallow in eternal manchildhood, the other struggling towards something that resembles adulthood through the simple expedient of latching onto a loving but long-suffering woman, who are whisked off on an adventure.  In this case, deadbeat Milo (George Webster) is stunned when a bearded, sword-wielding version of his newly-engaged best friend Danny (Blake Harrison) appears in his bedroom telling him that all versions of themselves in all alternate universes are being hunted by a mysterious villain, who promptly appears and attacks both of them.  Actually, Milo isn't that stunned, because he was epically high at the time.  But when the buzz wears off and there's still a dead body in his bedroom, he quickly finds Danny and the two end up bouncing from one universe to another, trying to survive and figure out why they're being hunted.
  
  There are some original touches in Tripped--the reason for Milo and Danny's predicament turns out to be cleverer than expected; there's a nice touch when it's revealed that Milo, whom Danny sees as an albatross around his neck keeping him from growing up, is actually a positive influence on him, and that in all universes in which the two weren't friends Danny became a selfish, villainous person; and also it's nice that the show at least tries to give Danny's fiancée Kate (Georgina Campbell) a bigger role than such stories usually do, and more of a personality than the humorless nag who just wants her man to grow up and settle down.  But in the end, this is a very familiar type of story that doesn't deviate from its predictable template, in which Milo and Danny constantly teeter on the verge of annihilation, only to win through with a combination of dumb luck, unexpectedly useful skills, and the strength of their friendship.  If this is the sort of thing you like, then Tripped is a pretty good example of the genre (and the fact that the season only spans four half-hour episodes keeps it from overstaying its welcome).  But one can't help but wish that this genre was a little less popular and evergreen, or that somebody might make some twists to it like--gasp!--telling this same story about a pair of female friends.
  
  
• London Spy - In the opening moments of this miniseries, Danny (Ben Whishaw), an aimless young man with a complicated personal and sexual history, meets and falls head-over-heels in love with Alex (Edward Holcroft), a mysterious, naive, and emotionally repressed genius.  The two embark on what seems like a storybook romance, only slightly hampered by Alex's obvious secretiveness, and the fact that so little of what he tells Danny about his life makes sense.  When Alex disappears and is later found dead in what looks like an S&M adventure gone wrong, Danny is the only one who believes that there's more to the story.  Aided by his friend Scottie (Jim Broadbent), he embarks on an investigation into Alex's life and history that quickly draws to him the attention of extremely powerful, dangerous organizations.
  
  There's a lot to like about London Spy, and a lot to dislike.  At the most basic level, the fact that this very familiar, very common type of spy thriller (the whole thing reminded me very strongly of The Constant Gardener) is being told with a central love story between two men--and in which the love story is both swooningly romantic and unabashedly sexual--is something to celebrate.  The best version of this miniseries is the one in which Danny tries to work through his grief and lingering feelings of anger and betrayal, finally coming to the realization that he can still love Alex even though he didn't really know him, and that he can forgive Alex's secrets and lies--that these, in fact, do not change how important a role Danny played in Alex's life.  It's also really interesting and rewarding that the show does so much with the fact of Danny, Alex, and Scottie being gay, and with how their sexual histories and proclivities affect how they're seen by the supposedly liberal society around them.  It's a sweet and beautiful touch, for example, that Danny's initial realization that the version of Alex being presented to him by the people who orchestrated his death is a fake comes from his certain knowledge that Alex was a virgin when they met, and that this knowledge allows him to see through so many of the lies he's told about Alex over the course of the miniseries (though this also has the, I hope unintentional, effect of treating kink and S&M as inherently seedy and unromantic, as opposed to Danny and Alex's "pure" sex life).  In another scene, Scottie, a high-ranking civil servant, is outraged when Danny treats him as part of the establishment, pointing out that he has been distrusted and shunted aside for decades because of his orientation, the suppression of which has left him without a personal life and family.
  
  But while the romantic melodrama aspects of London Spy work really well, the spy story is equal parts turgid and ridiculous.  The mini builds up the awesomeness of the forces arrayed against Danny, which systematically break down and destroy his life when he refuses to give up his investigation into Alex's murder, until we can be in no doubt that whatever Alex discovered must have been enormously important and dangerous.  But technothrillers of London Spy's ilk rarely deliver on that kind of promise, because they're not really interested in the implications of the McGuffin they posit.  So that when the mini starts to talk about algorithms and super-smart internet data mining, it's hard not to let your eyes glaze over, because it clearly isn't taking this any more seriously than we are.  (Over at Strange Horizons's year in review piece, Dan Hartland briefly suggests that London Spy can be read as SF because of the fantasticness of Alex's discovery, but to me this seems unconvincing.)  Even worse, nothing changes after Danny realizes what Alex left for him to discover, and he continues in the same passive-aggressive game of one-upmanship with forces that, realistically, should already have disposed of him once he refused to back down.  London Spy doesn't really know how to end its story, and instead ends up repeating the same beats again and again--another assault that strips away one of the few things Danny still cares about while leaving him still standing, another attempt to prove to him that Alex wasn't who he thought he was.  By the time it cobbles together an ending, in which Danny decides that he must continue to try to expose Alex's murder no matter the hopelessness of that cause and the surely disastrous consequences to himself, the winding path we've taken to get there makes it feel less like a climax and more like another step on a samey path.  London Spy wants to be a tragic love story, about a man who is willing burn himself up just to prove how much he loved someone who, in life, never really knew this.  The performances, particularly by Whishaw, are strong enough to carry this kind of story, but the bitty, repetitive, and ultimately unconvincing plot lets it down.
  
  
• The Magicians - As regular readers of this blog know, I genuinely disliked Lev Grossman's bestselling novel, on which this new SyFy series is based.  I found it to be an unnecessary, indulgent celebration of a self-pitying child of privilege, who seemed genuinely injured by the world's failure to simply hand him a sense of purpose and a life-long adventure.  So if you'd told me, going into the first episode of The Magicians, that it takes profound liberties with its source material, I probably would have been pleased.  The problem is that the things I disliked about Grossman's novel are clearly not the things that the showrunners of The Magicians saw as flaws, while the things that worked about the novel are the ones they seem to have been most eager to get rid of.  I never had any problems with Grossman's core project with The Magicians--to dismantle the central trope of portal fantasy, in which a single (usually white and male) Chosen One must defeat an ancient evil, and in which crossing over to a world that has magic immediately makes one's life brighter and more meaningful.  My problem was rather that Grossman wrote as if no one before him had had this idea, when in fact there have been dozens of fantasy writers who have explored it, most of them with a great deal more intelligence and nuance than Grossman showed.  (M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, for example, makes The Magicians look like the children's novels it claims to be deconstructing, not least because it lacks its fawning British-philia and overpowering, embarrassing undertone of class envy.)  The Magicians, the show, serves these tropes straight up.  Its Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), a callow, upper-middle-class young man who is offered a place at Brakebills, a university of magic, actually is the Chosen One, and there actually is an ancient evil that he needs to defeat.  Honestly, what was the point?
  
  It's possible that later episodes will move the show back into alignment with the novel, but there's a lot about the pilot that makes me reluctant to stick around and find out.  The novel, which was locked into Quentin's self-pitying, depressed point of view, at least implied that his perspective was an unreliable one.  The show seems to expect us to take his sense of himself as an underdog seriously.  You see this most especially in the character of Penny, a future villain (Arjun Gupta), who in the novel is the uber-geek to Quentin's cool, lovable geek, turning their shared love of the Narnia-esque children's series Fillory into something joyless and possessive.  In the show, Penny is a tattooed, musclebound jock who always has a hot girl draped over him, and who looms over Quentin, mocking his nerdy literary tastes, the better to validate Quentin's persecution complex.  (The fact that the show also changes Penny's race from white to Indian has implications that I don't think anyone involved with it has realized.)  Add to this a scene in which Quentin's friend Julia (Stella Maeve), who was rejected from Brakebills, is recruited into an underground magical circle by a sinister figure who threatens to rape her in order to expose her latent magical powers (he later says that he never "really" meant to rape her, as if this makes an actual difference), and I really don't feel compelled to give The Magicians a second chance.
  
  
• The Expanse - All due respect to Childhood's End and The Magicians, but The Expanse was the show that SyFy was banking on to jumpstart its moribund genre credentials and reestablish it as a channel for people who like science fiction.  And having watched the first half of the season, it's easy to see why.  This is meat-and-potatoes space opera with a slick, obviously costly appearance and a setting that offers huge scope for interesting storytelling.  In an unspecified future, Earth and a partially-terraformed Mars are vying for control of the asteroid belt and its resources, while the space-born miners who supply both planets with the means for their advancement feel oppressed by planets they could never survive on.  The series kicks off with a crooked cop on Ceres stations (Thomas Jane) being hired to find a missing heiress who has involved herself with separatists from the asteroid belt, and an ice-mining freighter investigating a distress signal that turns out to be a trap, which leaves only a handful of survivors to discover why their ship was destroyed and their friends killed.  Back on Earth, a ruthless politician (Shohreh Aghdashloo) fears that the cold war between Earth and Mars is about to heat up, and is willing to do anything to prevent this, or at least make sure Earth has the upper hand.
  
  My one real problem with The Expanse is actually less with the show and more with the PR and hype that have surrounded it.  SyFy clearly wants this to be their new Battlestar Galactica, and have thus stressed the political aspect of the story.  But though the show's worldbuilding is really interesting--some of the best scenes involve minor characters expressing how the people of Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt see each other, the resentments and prejudices that have built up between them--what it does with this world is thoroughly conventional (and, as much as I ended up resenting its desperate bid for political relevance, doesn't even come close to the sophistication and depth of Galactica's storytelling).  Except for how much more expensive it is (which is to say, better looking and peopled with better actors) it's hard to see what makes The Expanse so much better than Dark Matter and Killjoys, the low-rent, decidedly cheesy but slightly more fun space operas that SyFy aired last summer.
  
  Certainly when it comes to playing games with gender and sexuality, The Expanse falls way behind those two shows, Killjoys in particular.  The two male leads who drive its more propulsive storylines are so boringly familiar that they might as well be placeholders, and both of them are driven by motivations that treat women as means to an end--the leader of the ice-freighter survivors wants revenge for his murdered girlfriend, and the detective has become obsessed with the femme fatale he's searching for, who exists only as an idealized image in his mind.  Meanwhile, the more interesting women around both characters--a crewmember on the spacer's ship who is curiously overqualified for the job and might have a checkered past, and the detective's captain and fellow officer--get shunted off to the side, even as secondary plotlines include such stories as a principled cop who becomes infatuated with a kindhearted prostitute.  (Aghdashloo is obviously the glaring exception to the predictable, constrained roles that The Expanse gives women, but of the three main characters she's the one who is forced to be the most passive, to observe and plot where the spacer and detective get to fight and work their way towards plot developments.)  There's still a lot to enjoy and keep watching for in The Expanse, but its vision of the future is ultimately hidebound--we haven't even mentioned the show's assumption that the disaffected workers on the asteroid belt exist in a binary state, either downtrodden victims or terrorists; the word "union" is never mentioned, possibly because nobody involved with the show realizes that it's an option, and of course the possibility that societies in space might organize themselves along principles that differ from 21st century capitalism is never considered.  Which means that, fun as it is, The Expanse's claims to be the next big thing in televized SF should be taken with a grain of salt.

Gathered Round a Roaring Television, Part 1

I didn't write anything about the fall TV season this (last) year, because frankly, it was too dismal and boring to write anything about, and anything I could have said would have just joined the chorus of thinkpieces lamenting the networks' inability to produce anything resembling worthwhile new shows.  But here we are in winter, with the network shows on break or just coming out of it, and suddenly we've been inundated with a whole gaggle of interesting, ambitious projects that remind us of what the medium is capable of.  I didn't love all of the works I'm about to review--in fact I genuinely disliked some of them--but at least they gave me something to write about, which is more than can be said for the raft of samey procedurals and unfunny comedies we were slogging through in the fall.

• And Then There Were None - My first reaction when I heard that the BBC was planning a new adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel was to wonder why anyone would bother.  I read the novel as a teenager, and I remember it being clever but mechanical, and rather awkward in delivering a final twist that, I felt certain, everyone must know by now (as this highly scientific poll reveals, it's actually more like a 50/50 split).  Once you knew the twist, I thought, going through the motions of watching the ten strangers gathered together on Soldier Island get picked off one by one by an unknown assailant seemed rather pointless, and not a little bit mean-spirited.  As it turns out, the problem must have been in Christie's writing, and in her Fair Play obsession with laying out the precise details of every murder so that the reader could work out the killer on their own.  The BBC version is a lot less interested in the whodunnit of the story, and more focused on the psychological effects of its gruesome events.  It very effectively captures the breakdown of the rigid social conventions that govern the type of 30s house party the characters think they've been invited to, and which they initially try to cling to before the reality of being trapped with a killer sinks in.  As the cast is whittled down, the claustrophobia and paranoia rise, and the characters begin to let go of their pretense of civility--including, eventually, their insistence that they are innocent of the crimes of which they've been accused by their tormentor, and for which they've been sentenced to death.
  
  The entire cast is strong, but Maeve Dermody and Aidan Turner are particularly good as a clever, capable young woman concealing a terrible capacity for evil, and the only member of the party willing to admit to his own moral depravity.  The miniseries also makes some changes to some of the characters' backstories and the crimes they've been accused of, which taken together suggest that despite the killer's proclamations, what's on trial in this story is actually the pre-War British way of life, and its thoughtless assumptions about class and racial superiority.  My only problem with this adaptation is that if you watch it knowing who the killer is, and observing their interactions with the other characters, it becomes easier to see that they are a cruel psychopath, and that for all their pretenses to be seeking justice, the fact that they've constructed such an elaborate, sadistic game suggests that they're much more interested in bringing more suffering and pain into the world.  The mini tries to address this in several scenes that obliquely hint at the killer's depravity before they are revealed, but the structure of the story--in which they only get a short scene to explain themselves--means that this thread is inevitably shortchanged.  Even with all the welcome alterations that it makes to Christie's original, it's hard to finish And Then There Were None and not feel at least a little unsatisfied.  It's not that we want any of these, for the most part unrepentant, murderers to survive, but by the end of their torment we don't really want their killer to win either.  For all the changes that this version of the story makes, and despite its overall success at making something more resonant than the novel it's based on, it doesn't find a way to deprive the killer of the last word.
  
  
• Sherlock: The Abominable Bride - A few weeks ago, while reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman: Overture, it occurred to me that, slowly but surely, Gaiman's Sandman and Steven Moffat's Doctor had become the same type of character, a protean trickster figure who exists in many forms, but who is always fundamentally the same, and essential to the proper running of the universe.  Inevitably, both of these authors return to a story about their characters' multifarious existence, about the many types of stories told about them and the many guises they take, all of which have the same heart (Gaiman has also told this type of story about Batman, with the rather forgettable Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?).  About halfway into "The Abominable Bride"--the one-off/special/standalone episode that stands in for this year's season of Sherlock--we realize that Moffat is now telling this kind of story about Sherlock Holmes.  What initially seems like a rather pointless, tail-swallowing trip back to the 19th century (which only throws into sharper relief how much Sherlock, and Benedict Cumberbatch's performance in particular, owe to Granada's magnificent adaptation of Doyle's stories, with the incomparable Jeremy Brett as Holmes) turns out to be a reflection on Holmes's many facets, leading us to ask: is this a story about Sherlock, in the 21st century, imagining how his life might be like as a Victorian detective, or is it about Holmes, in the 19th century, imagining his life in a future that has flying machines and mobile phones?
  
  On the face of it, this makes a certain amount of sense.  Holmes has been reimagined and reinvented dozens of times since his creation more than a century ago, and the best of these variations retain a certain essential Holmes-ishness no matter how much they change the character.  So why not tell a story in which these different versions meet and comment on each other? Especially one that also reminds us how much Holmes, even within his own story, is mediated by his chronicler?  The problem, unfortunately, is that by calling attention to Holmes's many facets, Moffat and co-creator Mark Gatiss (who is also credited as writer on this episode) remind us how little they understand the character.  Or rather, how much they want him to be something he was never meant to be.  No matter how badly Moffat wants it, Sherlock Holmes is not a superhero.  He is not an elemental force binding the universe together, and he is definitely not The Doctor.  What makes Holmes such an evergreen and resilient character is, on the contrary, his humanity--his kindness, his decency, his appreciation of human folly and weirdness--and this is something that Sherlock has never been able to accept.  "The Abominable Bride," like so many Sherlock stories before it, tries to tell us that we need Sherlock to save the world, when this has never been Holmes's function, and has always been the least interesting and least convincing use to which the show has put its title character.
  
  Along the way, there are several ideas that must have looked good on paper but really don't work on screen.  Andrew Scott's Moriarty returns not as Sherlock's nemesis (which he was never any good at) but as a representative of his fears, his self-loathing, and most of all his addiction to drugs.  In principle, this is a good way of walking back Moriarty's return at the end of the last season (in the face of fandom's uniformly negative reaction to that development), but it runs aground on Sherlock's consistent failure to engage with its title character's addiction on any but the most simplistic terms, and even then, only when it suits it.  Even more dangerously, there's an attempt to address the show's history of misogyny that goes so spectacularly wrong that it's almost amazing to watch.  For one thing, this element corralled into the 19th century story strand--thus implying that misogyny was a problem of the Victorians, despite the fact that Conan Doyle's original stories are much better than Sherlock has ever been at featuring interesting female characters who are treated with respect and are allowed to move the plot in their own right.  And then, for some inexplicable reason, the show delivers a twist on "The Five Orange Pips" in which the secret society hounding Holmes's client is a group of feminist avengers who hunt down and kill cheaters and abusers--an already problematic plot development that is made even more so when you remember that in the original story, the secret society in question was the KKK.  That's right, in Steven Moffat's universe, feminism takes its cues from the Klan, and criticizing Sherlock on the internet is akin to stabbing philandering husbands in the heart while dressed as an avenging, ghostly bride.
  
  Somewhat strangely, the only character who still works and still feels human is Gatiss's Mycroft--all the more impressive when you consider that his screen time in the 19th century strand is devoted to an unpleasant, offensive fat joke.  In the 21st century strand, however, Gatiss is very good at conveying the anguish of loving someone who is incapable of recognizing or returning that love, and of having to stand by and watch as they destroy themselves.  If the rest of Sherlock were as human and real as the few moments in which we see Mycroft laments his inability to save his brother from himself, it would be something to watch.  Instead, all we get is Moffat's increasingly desperate attempts to make the show, and the character, into something they could never be.
  
  
• Childhood's End - In principle, you have to respect what SyFy was trying to do with this miniseries.  After nearly a decade of relying almost exclusively on schlock, pulp, and shows that have nothing to do with science fiction for their bread and butter, the channel seems genuinely to be trying to get back to its roots.  And how better to do that than with a handsome, serious, expensive-looking adaptation of one of the core works of Golden Age science fiction?  Going into the miniseries, one's knowledge of SyFy's proclivities (and of what tends to happen to SF when it gets adapted by just about anyone) leads you to expect the familiar corner-cutting and standardization.  You expect the whole story to be turned into the heroic saga of one ruggedly handsome white man who saves the world through the sheer force of his virility while an adoring, stick-thin and perfectly-coiffed woman looks on.  And, to be fair, there is some of that here--the character who in the novel was the Secretary-General of the UN is transformed into a Midwestern farmer who dresses in nothing but jeans and leather jackets, and three of the five main female characters are defined purely as love interests and mothers.  But on the whole Childhood's End is a meditative and rather bleak story that avoids the temptation to veer into pulp.  No one here is going to save the day.  When the aliens who dub themselves The Overlords arrive on Earth and announce that they are going to save us from ourselves, it very quickly becomes clear that there's nothing we can do about that except hope that they are truly as benevolent as they claim to be.  And the answer to that question turns out to be both "yes" and "no"--the aliens' benevolence is a means to an end, and that end is, when viewed in a certain light, extremely sinister.  But the aliens themselves are not sinister at all, and the miniseries works hard (perhaps a little too hard) to present them as kind, compassionate beings who are doing what they think is right, and who have a compelling (if, to me, not really convincing) argument that this is, in fact, the right thing to do.
  
  The problem is that none of this is very interesting to watch, and certainly not over six nearly interminable hours.  I haven't read the Arthur C. Clarke novel on which the miniseries is based, so I have no idea where Childhood's End's faults are rooted, but the script (by Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes creator Matthew Graham, which honestly surprised me quite a bit when I learned it) has hardly a single interesting or surprising moment, hardly a single line of dialogue that doesn't feel canned and predictable.  Childhood's End is clearly trying to be somber, but what it ends up landing on, most of the time, is underpowered, and even boring.  And that, in turn, makes it easier to notice the flaws in its basic concept, and in how Graham develops it.  The methods that the Overlords use to solve the problems of war, poverty, and inequality are, well, childish--in one scene, we're told that hunger is going to be solved because the US will use the ships of its recently decommissioned Navy to send America's leftovers to Africa, which is literally the sort of idea that a bright sixth-grader might come up with, but not something we can be expected to take seriously in a production aimed at adults.  Neither was I particularly convinced by the miniseries's contention that, without the pressures of necessity and scarcity, humanity will cease to care about work, art, or scientific pursuit.  (What's missing from the entire discussion--and here I suspect that the fault lies with the novel--is capitalism, and the idea that it too is a problem that the Overlords need to solve, perhaps the root of all other problems.  Without addressing that, all the solutions the miniseries suggests to our woes feel incomplete and meaningless.)  By the time the end comes around, and with it the expectation that we will buy into the idea that humanity needs to die so that God can come into existence, I was completely checked out.  Without reading the novel, it's hard to know whether Childhood's End could have worked with a better script, or whether its concept is irrevocably flawed, but either way it remains a well-intentioned bid for respectability, not a worthwhile work in its own right.
  
  
• Dickensian - Five episodes in, I still find myself puzzled by the core concept of this series, which imagines that the background and supporting characters of some half dozen Dickens novels (and a few of the leads) all live on the same street and interact with each other.  I don't consider myself a Dickens fan (though I know enough about his novels, from general knowledge and watching adaptations, to have recognized all the main characters in Dickensian, and to know what's in store for most of them) and maybe that means that this show simply isn't for me.  But it's hard not to see the show as a sort of theme park selling the Dickens Experience--lots of quirky characters with odd names, even odder habits of speech, and hard-knock lives, all bouncing against each other at Christmastime.  The obvious point of comparison, Penny Dreadful, works because it quickly finds its own tone and builds its own world from its borrowed materials, but Dickensian still feels like little more than pastiche.  Of the three main storylines, one is an elaboration--the investigation of the murder of Jacob Marley (of A Christmas Carol fame)--while the other two are prequels describing the downfall of two young women, Honoria Barbary (Sophie Rundle), whose engagement to a young officer is endangered by her embittered sister (thus setting up the main plotline of Bleak House), and Amelia Havisham (Tuppence Middleton), who becomes romantically entangled with a scoundrel after her brother hires him to get at her inheritance (which will presumably lead her to wander around in a wedding dress plotting vengeance on all men, as she does in Great Expectations).  Unless creator Tony Jordan is planning to do something a little more bold than the show, so far, seems to promise, that means that we're watching a slow-motion trainwreck, the exact opposite of what Dickens's novels tend to deliver.  (But then, maybe I'm giving Jordan too little credit--the first episode, after all, ends with Little Nell miraculously recovering from her seemingly fatal illness.)
  
  For all that, I've found Dickensian unexpectedly enjoyable and compelling.  Largely, this is the execution--the writing is sharp, the actors are all solid, and the pacing is impeccable (on that last point, it really helps that the show's episodes are only half an hour long; it's still too rare for the writers of dramas to recognize that their running time isn't a function of their genre, but should reflect the needs of their story).  You end up wanting to know what happens next even if the project as a whole still feels a little dodgy.  But it also helps that the show has constructed some clever and moving family drama in the chinks of Dickens's stories.  Honoria's sister Frances (Alexandra Moen), who is judgmental, priggish, and actively working to destroy her sister's happiness, also has extremely sympathetic moments.  We see how she has trapped herself (and been trapped, by social expectations and her domineering father) in the responsible, caretaking role, while her younger, prettier sister gets to dream of romance, and is protected from the family's financial problems.  Her bitterness over this understandable, even as it corrodes her soul.  Similarly, the triangle that develops between Miss Havisham, her whiny brother, and the soulless adventurer he hires to destroy her, is fascinating, constantly shifting to expose parallel currents of love and hate between all three of them.  Middleton is particularly good at conveying both Amelia's determination and her vulnerability.  We can imagine how this woman could be destroyed by the act of betrayal being perpetrated upon her, but we also really want her to find a way to overcome it (or maybe just to take her revenge on the right people, and thoroughly trounce her brother and his partner).
  
  I suspect that I won't know what I actually think about Dickensian until it concludes and I have a clearer sense of what Jordan's project is (for one thing, I'm a lot less interested in the murder mystery than, I suspect, the show wants me to be).  The show has been so well-made so far, though, that it's hard not to root for it to find a justification for its existence--something that makes it its own story, or even a meaningful commentary on Dickens and his work, not just an imitation filling in his margins.