Best new show:
The Pitt
I was a bit hesitant about starting The Pitt and waited a few weeks before catching up. I must have watched ER daily for years - the way that Austrian TV worked, new episodes of US TV shows would air every weekday, so this was my post-school ritual. Noah Wyle - here a veteran doctor leading the ER - is at the centre of the ensemble cast whose 15-hour-shift we are following, hour by hour. The format is interesting, because it limits our POV, with the only escape being PTSD flashbacks to COVID times (that also don't leave the ER). And the show originally airs week-by-week, meaning that it requires the viewers to remind themselves that only an hour has passed (and at the same time, the sheer pace and propulsion of the show makes it difficult to binge without feeling overwhelmed). The doctors treat case after case, many hang around, many things go deeply, emotionally horrifyingly, wrong. It's like watching human beings accrue psychic damage while still trying to do their jobs in the best and most humane way possible. At the same time, it's clear that this is also a furious indictment of mixing healthcare with a profit motive, of the ill-suited and dangerous managerial language used by hospital leadership with little care for employees and patients.
Hal and Harper
This is a showcase of Lili Reinhart and Cooper Raiff's acting - they play the children of a deeply damaged father (Mark Ruffalo) who were forced to grow up too quickly after a traumatic event in their childhood. Reinhart (a revelation here) is stoic, carrying everyone's grief on her shoulder, Raiff is arrested in his development, and they are dangerously co-dependent on one another. Some of the most moving scenes of the series place the adult actors in the past, acting out the childhood of their characters (Raiff does brilliant work as the overenthusiastic and exuberant child version of Hal), always awkwardly standing out against the backdrop of the children surrounding them. A beautiful show.
Long Story Short
A Thousand Blows
It's such an astonishing coincidence, or perhaps just the outcome of great artists supporting each other into new projects, that Erin Doherty delivers one of the best performances of the year in A Thousand Blows only to then follow it up with another one in her singular outstanding episode of Adolescence, written by her co-star Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne (whose work I've been following since he wrote Naomi's episode of Skins). This is also an interesting companion piece to Dope Girls, which is more experimental in its approach - set in Victorian London, two newly arrived Jamaican friends (played by Malachy Kirby and Francis Lovehall, both great) navigate their way through the East End Underworld, and intersect with an all-women gang of thieves (the Forty Elephants) led by Doherty's Mary Carr, who has a great coup in the works. They also butt up against the Goodson boxing brothers (James Nelson-Joyce and Stephen Graham) - and this is very much not the "gentleman" version of boxing, but bare-knuckled struggle, sometimes to death.
Dope Girls
After WW1, with soldiers returning from the front, the women who have stepped up in their absence are relegated back to being wives and mothers, but the world has changed radically, and nothing is as it was. The first season of Dope Girls documents the dual rise of two women in spheres previously closed to them. Julianne Nicholson's Kate Galloway, left to raise her daughter (Eilidh Fisher) on her own after the suicide of her husband, ends up entangled in the Soho nightlife. A series of unfortunate events brings her on a collision course with an Italian gang and into possession of a different kind of nightclub, in which dancer Billie Cassidy (Umi Myers) wants to perform her transgressive art free from outside control. At the same time, Eliza Scanlen's Violet Davis is trying to become one of the first ten women police officers and doesn't hesitate to snitch on anyone to get what she wants. She's sent undercover by her boss. Dope Girls has been compared to Peaky Blinders, but I was much more reminded of Babylon Berlin, which takes place a bit later in history (but also in a melting pot of conservatism and transgression) but has a similarly visually stunning style, and uses music to propel the story forward.
Best one-season show:
Dying for Sex
I don't even have words for this show. Michelle Williams shines in every way, which is not surprising (she's been killing it in Kelly Reichardt movies for years, and she was so beautifully drily funny in Showing Up), but it's literally every one in this show: Jenny Slate, devastating as the best friend who takes care of her dying life partner (she fucking floored me). Esco Jouley, who is such a discovery, as the care counselor who is with her the whole way. Rob Delaney, Kelvin Yu, Sissy Spacek, Paula Pell in a small but impactful role (Girls5Eva will be so missed). The non-judgemental approach to sex, the meaning-making about death (and the direct approach to both), this will stay with me for a very long time.
Apple Cider Vinegar
I had a genuinely difficult time to get through Apple Cider Vinegar, which is in no way a reflection on how good the show was: the fantastic cast, for one, with Kaitlyn Dever's rare accomplishment of pulling off a fake Australian accent that lets you forget she's not Australian, at the head of a cast of up- and coming and well-established Australian actors (Aisha Dee and Alycia Debnam-Carey returned from their beginnings in US television, Tilda Cobham-Hervey in a heartbreaking role, the great Susie Porter and Mark Coles Smith). While this was probably originally produced because it fits into the recent trend of bringing well-known female con women to the screen (The Dropout, Inventing Anna), Dever's performance is a step above, and the tone is very much removed from the satire of its predecessors. Debnam-Carey and Porter, as a mother and daughter who are dying of cancer and yet have bought into the ideology of self-healing so much that they do not seek adequate medical help, are the emotionally devastating core of the story (especially Porter, who refuses medical help out of love and support for her daughter's ideology).
Adolescence
Just four episodes, all filmed in one continuous shot, to follow the arrest of a thirteen-year old boy (played by newcomer Owen Cooper in his first ever performance, to start off what is certain to be a great career) for a horrific crime against a female classmate. There are no answers here about what to do about the radicalisation of young men and boys, only the grief and horror of the fall-out. The show itself acknowledges what its one shortcoming is - centering the story of Owen and his family, rather than the girl he killed, who never appears on screen alive and who is grieved by a best friend who rages against what happened. The second episode captures the unbridgeable generational gap that makes the actions so difficult to decipher - a whole new language of symbols, closed off to parents and the investigating detectives. The third episode is the stand-out: Erin Doherty plays a psychologist tasked with assessing Jamie, trying to "understand his understanding" through a precarious series of questions that elicit his attempts at humour, charm, but also outbursts of rage and violence, where he oscillates between childishness and threatening adolescence, from making himself as small as possible to looming over her and enjoying her attempts to control her fear.
Death By Lightning
Best show:
The Last of Us
Slow Horses
Saddest Goodbyes:
The Wheel of Time
There were moments during The Wheel of Time's third season where I couldn't believe the collection of fantastic actors that the show had managed to assemble: at one point, political arguments unfolded between characters played by Olivia Williams, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and Sophie Okonedo (all supporting actors - it's hard to believe how enormous this ensemble cast is, led by Rosamund Pike). This season also fully embraced the idea that going all in on beautiful visuals is back: The Road to the Spear is a whole episode of stunning beauty. It's incredibly sad that this third season will be the last, that the show will not be given the opportunity to end on its own terms - but much in line with the worrying trend of queer and female-led shows ending prematurely.
I've been looking forward to this second season of Poker Face with the same delight in which I greet each new season of Only Murders in the Building: I know it's going to be a joy to check in each week, and with Poker Face
in particular, one of the greatest assets is Rian Johnson's ability to
have a roster of excellent guest stars. The specific joy of this season
has been seeing how a high concept show finds way to be creative without
abandoning its roots completely, and I almost like this version of the
story, where Charlie Cale is unbound from the through-line of running
from the Mafia, better. The best two episodes of the season are twists:
one has no human victim (but instead a gerbil, a friend, that is more
grieve-able than some of the previous victims), but a horrifyingly scary
bad seed child at the helm, the other changes around the timeline, with
Charlie entering the story months after the crime has occurred instead
the days before.
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