Tag: television-tag/tv-review

But then there is most derided storyline of all, Miranda’s (Cynthia Nixon) romance with  the non-binary stand-up comic Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez), sometimes called television’s worst or most hated character. Oh my, that is still a mess, a collision of abysmally-written people, who both now seem cobbled together in the writers’ room.

Miranda has followed Che to Los Angeles, where they are starring in a television pilot for a sitcom called Che Pasa, which even they know is cheesy. It still seems that Che is meant to be talented and edgy, but that was never convincing. And when someone in a focus group for the pilot calls the television Che a “phony, sanitized, performative” version of what it is to be non-binary, it’s a meta moment that nods at the real-life criticism without changing anything. Despite that, this season Ramirez shows some heart in Che, a self-acknowledged narcissist. But poor, withering Miranda. For all her blathering about being brave and finding her true self, she has turned into a dithering, besotted, insecure and boring person, in all seven of the episodes available for review (of the season’s 11).

Still, fans are hungry for more, even if it’s the same old more. Take a breath on Aiden, though, he doesn’t show up for quite a long time. After all her progress, if Carrie ended up in a back-to-the-future relationship with him that would be annoying, but getting on some viewers’ nerves may be this series’ superpower. Samantha Irby, a writer on both seasons, responded to criticism of the first in a recent New York Times interview, saying, “People will hate season two too, but they’ll watch it”. The most astute prediction just came from inside the house.

★★☆☆☆

And Just Like That . . . premieres on 22 July on Max in the US and Sky Comedy and NOW in the UK

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She doesn’t seem to have any interests beyond writing pretentiously in her journal (“I am lost and then I am found… I have a sense of symmetry. That somehow I have conquered two sides of a mountain at the same time”) and a bit of light BDSM. By the time we do learn about her past and why she is the way she is, we’re absolutely bored to tears by her.

But we don’t really know anything about William either. He’s barely two-dimensional. His character description in a CliffsNotes for this show would read simply: “Successful surgeon. Likes olives and light BDSM.” It’s hard to feel anything for either him or Anna. 

The bestselling 1990 novella on which this is based – Damage by Josephine Hart, made into a 1992 film of the same name, starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche – is narrated by the William Farrow character so there we have access to, at least, his thoughts and feelings in a way that we simply don’t here. 

The eventual ending left me with a lot of questions, none of which was “Will there be a second season?” But if it also fails to get your juices flowing, don’t despair. Although Nicholas Barber has argued on BBC Culture that the 1992 movie Basic Instinct represented both the apogee and the end of the erotic thriller, Obsession is merely the first thrust in a veritable orgy of upcoming productions trying to revive the genre. Among others, we can look forward to Fatal Attraction, which has been repurposed as a TV series and arrives on Paramount Plus at the end of this month, starring Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson. Peacock is remaking the 1996 move Fear (“Fatal Attraction for teens,” the original film’s producer called it), while Apple TV+ has announced Presumed Innocent with Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga, adapted from the 1987 Scott Turow novel of the same name, which was previously filmed with Harrison Ford.

It looks as though, after a lengthy recovery period, the erotic thriller has lead in its pencil again. Let’s hope, unlike Obsession, these other new shows are more “Moans softly” than “Exhales sharply”.

★★☆☆☆

Obsession is released on Netflix internationally on 13 April

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Nonetheless, Joel wakes up in a dilapidated hospital, and is told the news by Firefly leader Marlene (Merle Dandridge): the Cordyceps fungus that has taken root inside Ellie’s brain holds the key to saving mankind, but there is no way to remove it without killing the host. As we’re shown in the opening flashback – starring the impressive Ashley Johnson, the original voice of Ellie, as the character’s mother – Marlene was there when Ellie was born. Which, no matter the size of the big picture, makes her decision to sedate Ellie without giving her a choice feel ruthlessly pragmatic. Yet that arguably pales in comparison to what comes next.

There is something about the brutal, nihilistic nature of post-apocalyptic fiction that makes it particularly susceptible to reactionary politics. These are cruel worlds where conservative values reign supreme; macho Wild West fantasies where only the strong and self-interested survive, and where men reclaim their place as gun-toting hunter-gatherers. Despite its ostensibly liberal politics – episode three’s tender gay love story being the prime example – The Last of Us has not exactly proved the exception to the rule (for that, you should seek out another HBO series, last year’s sublime Station Eleven). Although the scene where Joel rampages through the hospital, killing everyone as he goes – a man with his hands up in surrender, a relatively harmless surgeon, a pleading Marlene – before dooming the world to misery and death, does at least subvert the idea of the noble strongman.

Much like in the game, you start out rooting for Joel, because you want him to save Ellie, but the knotty nature of his choices (including lying to her about what happened), even if they are perfectly understandable, ultimately challenges your sense of right and wrong. It’s an ending about the difficulty of love at all costs, and what it means to find something to live for amid the ashes. The original voice actor of Joel, Troy Baker, once rationalised the character’s decision: “People have asked me, ‘why would Joel do that when he could have saved the world?’, and my answer to them is always this – he did, he did save the world. It’s just that the world was that girl, and that’s it.”

Still, it’s an act that will have consequences. This will no doubt become more obvious in the next series, an adaptation of The Last of Us: Part II, a sequel that explores how Joel’s actions, from another character’s perspective, are indefensibly selfish and obscene. It is a lengthy, meaty story about how there is no such thing as heroes and villains, how everyone is simply the protagonist in their own story. It is about as bold and interesting as sequels get.

In the meantime, we have the first series of The Last of Us. The show has become a staggering success. Ratings are high. Buzz abounds. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine my mother would know what a Clicker is. It is, by far, the greatest video-game adaptation ever made, even if it falls short of truly great television. What was fresh and exciting in video games in 2013 can often feel derivative and well-worn in 2023 TV. But none of that matters much when the characters are this absorbing, the performances this strong. Joel’s choice might not have saved the world, but it has bought The Last of Us a long, shocking, harrowing future. We should be grateful to him for it.

★★★★☆

You can catch up with The Last of US on HBO Max in the US and NOW in the UK

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The sleek, involving first episode, written and directed by Johnson, is among the best. The murder happens at a garish Las Vegas-like hotel and casino, and the episode is shot to look like a 1970s television show, with saturated colours and ominous music cues. That playful look works once, then Johnson smartly drops it for more cinematic approaches in later instalments. He knows how far to mimic a formula and when to throw it away. (Other writers and directors take over, starting with episode three.)

When a hotel maid (Dasha Polanco) discovers a horrifying image on a guest’s computer in that first story, she notifies the hotel manager, played with perfect smarminess by Adrien Brody. Establishing the show’s pattern, Charlie turns up about 20 minutes in and the timeline shifts back to before the murder, with scenes telling us why she was around in the first place. Here she turns up as a cocktail waitress wearing a goofy feathered hat.

It’s enough to say that things go wrong and Charlie has to flee, with the casino’s hitman, (Benjamin Bratt) chasing after her. Bratt’s character gives the series its slender continuity and a reason for Charlie to travel around under the radar, taking jobs as a waitress or a cleaner, trying to stay a step ahead of the killer.

The guests are not mega movie stars, but familiar faces. In one episode, Chloe Sevigny, who played Lyonne’s character’s mother in Russian Doll’s flashbacks, stars as Ruby Ruin, a has-been singer in a metal band, now working at a warehouse. She gets the band back together and goes on the road, with Charlie selling their T-shirts. Like the Knives Out mysteries, Poker Face walks the line between straightforward and tongue-in-cheek, but where the films land on the campier side, the series is more invested in its plots. No detail is too small or silly to be a clue or a red herring, including the title of the metal band’s one hit, Staplehead.  

Lil Rel Howery plays the co-owner of a Texas barbecue restaurant, whose brother wants to quit the business, saying, “I’m going vegan”. Wit always takes precedence over seriousness here. Someone falls off a roof at a rest stop in New Mexico, where Charlie meets a trucker played by Hong Chau (The Whale). She later works at a retirement home and befriends 1970s radicals gleefully played by Judith Light and S Epatha Merkerson.

One other nostalgic touch: like those old series, Poker Face is not necessarily made to binge. It’s there, ready whenever you feel like a reassuring, cosy mystery that’s more rumpled crime-solver than Miss Marple.

★★★★☆

Poker Face premieres on 26 January on Peacock in the US

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The humour is much needed in the bleak, violent world that they traverse, where people are just as dangerous as the infected. The video game, which is split into four seasons across a year, is episodic in nature, with most locations featuring a sub-plot sketched out in letters and mementos that the player finds. The show builds upon these letters and fleshes them out into fully-formed stories. And it is here, when Druckmann and Mazin are at their most audacious in terms of creative licence, that The Last of Us truly sings as television.

Episode three, for example, turns a series of bitter letters between two men called Bill and Frank (implied to be lovers) into the most tender of romances. Set across two decades, it follows paranoid prepper Bill (Nick Offerman) as he strikes up a relationship with Frank (The White Lotus’ Murray Bartlett), a man who stumbles into one of his many traps. What follows is a beautiful, exquisitely performed exploration of The Last of Us’ central theme: that the ashes of the world are enough, as long as there is someone to live for amongst them.

It is a sentiment that is turned inside-out in episodes four and five, which follow Joel and Ellie as they make their way through the aftermath of a bloody uprising against an especially fascistic branch of FEDRA in Kansas City. The superb Melanie Lynskey (Yellowjackets) features here as the chillingly violent and vengeful leader of the revolution. She wants all collaborators executed, with a special emphasis on a man called Henry (Lamar Johnson), who murdered her brother. These episodes also feature some of the show’s best action sequences, including a huge set-piece involving the infected that is as grisly and gripping as any in the game.

It is not a perfect adaptation. There are certain scenes early on that feel too gamey for television (such as those where Joel and Ellie are sneaking around a museum), while the latter half of the series feels like it needs one more episode to even out the pace (scenes involving the infected are strangely scarce beyond episode five). There is also the fact that no on-screen adaptation of The Last of Us will ever truly capture what makes the source material so interesting: to be immersed in that world, to luxuriate in spaces that feel haunted by absence, to be eaten alive by a Clicker.

And yet, it doesn’t feel even remotely controversial to call this the best video game adaptation ever made. For fans of the game, it is an adaptation of the utmost skill and reverence, yet one still capable of surprise; for people who have never picked up a controller, it is an encapsulation of the game’s heart and soul – its full-blooded characters, its neat plotting, its mature themes of love and loss. It is, to finish Ellie’s joke, “outstanding in its field”.

★★★★☆

The Last of Us premieres on 15 January on HBO in the US and 16 January on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK

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But for all that Prince Charles and Princess Diana had one of the most extraordinary marriages in human history, the show does well to suggest how it might have been simultaneously sad in extremely ordinary ways: it’s a point poignantly made, in particular, through a conceit in which fictional couples whose divorces were stamped on the same day detail their own marital breakdowns. And while there had been some speculation that this current series might prove the very worst of PR for the new King, in fact, on top of championing his progressive values and work with The Prince’s Trust, its arbitration of the Wales’ marriage feels very equitable. One scene between them that sticks out for its unadorned sadness comes in the penultimate episode when an attempt at a truce, made over a plate of scrambled eggs in Princess Diana’s Kensington Palace flat, suddenly descends into recrimination: here, the show suggests, were two people that, through no singular fault, simply could never have been compatible.

As for the performances? They are, this time round, a very mixed bag. Inevitably it becomes harder for each new round of actors taking on royal duties to convince, as what happens on screen converges with more and more viewers’ real-life memories. Regardless, some performances here really just don’t work. That applies to Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret, who brings a strangely prim, pinched quality to the famously larger-than-life royal sibling. Equally, West as Prince Charles is all wrong: where his predecessor Josh O’Connor disappeared into the role, perfectly capturing the prince’s unworldly diffidence, among other things, West isn’t able to quell his roguishly assured star charisma.

Those actors who fare better, by contrast, are ones who don’t themselves have such an established persona to conceal. The relatively little-known Claudia Harrison follows Erin Doherty as another inspired choice for the Princess Royal, a perfect balance of severity and warmth, while Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip offers a masterclass in creating a convincing impression of a person without looking anything like them, and Debicki pretty effectively inhabits Princess Diana using a more obviously studied mimicry (the eyes directed upwards, the ethereal, slightly wooden intonation). And as for Staunton? At first, she seems all wrong for the part, somehow both too naturally bullish and too knowing. Yet, as the series goes on, she’s a performer of such intense conviction that the question of how much her Queen is really the Queen becomes increasingly less important.

Come the final episode of this series, a sense of déjà vu takes hold, as Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) arrives in power and Princess Diana is seen packing her bag for a visit to Mohamed Al-Fayed’s yacht, where she will encounter his son Dodi – because, of course, in its due-to-be-final next series, The Crown is set to cross over with The Queen, Morgan’s fine, Oscar-winning 2006 film about the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, which was the first fruit of his interest in Britain’s ruling family. I suspect the comparison with that rather more sophisticated work will do The Crown no favours at all – though regardless of that, as an incontrovertible TV “event” that is also a fail-safe controversy machine, it will undoubtedly have the world rapt until the very end.

The Crown series five is released on Netflix on 9 November.

★★★☆☆

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