The team of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (producers) and Garth Ennis (comics writer) has given us AMCâs âPreacher,â the most inventive, audacious and purely entertaining comics-based series of the past few years. With âPreacherâ on the way out â its final season begins Aug. 4 â the three are getting right back in the game, with a new show based on an Ennis comic, âThe Boys,â coming to Amazon Prime Video on Friday.
How do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, itâs hard to get your arms around â sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing.
This weekâs case study in the anxieties of contemporary television: âDead to Me,â a new series on Netflix starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as widows who meet cute at a grief support group.
Elaine Stritch melting down as she sings âThe Ladies Who Lunchâ over and over again, into the night. Record producer Thomas Z. Shepard telling her, âItâs just flaccid.â Stephen Sondheim, with elaborate patience, coaching a singer in the proper pronunciation of âbubi.â
Elaine Stritch melting down as she sings âThe Ladies Who Lunchâ over and over again, into the night. Record producer Thomas Z. Shepard telling her, âItâs just flaccid.â Stephen Sondheim, with elaborate patience, coaching a singer in the proper pronunciation of âbubi.â
It doesnât seem likely that Netflix and DC Universe, competitors in the field of subscription streaming video, get together to plan their schedules. So chalk it up to coincidence that Netflix is releasing âThe Umbrella Academyâ on the same day (Friday) that DC Universe is releasing âDoom Patrol,â while you note that the âDoom Patrolâ comic books were a primary model, along with âX-Men,â for the âUmbrella Academyâ comics.
Hercule Poirot is a flexible little fellow. He can be dapper and twinkling, as David Suchet played him for 24 years on television. He can be vigorously obsessive-compulsive, as Kenneth Branagh played him in âMurder on the Orient Expressâ in 2017.
Thereâs no mystery surrounding how âI Am the Night,â TNTâs new truthy-crime miniseries, came to be. Director Patty Jenkins met and befriended Fauna Hodel, author of a memoir, âOne Day Sheâll Darken,â about her difficult youth. Not quite a decade later Jenkins made âWonder Woman,â which made more than $821 million. Et voilĂ : âI Am the Night,â a long-gestating project âinspired by the life of Fauna Hodelâ with Jenkins as a director and executive producer.
In âBlack Earth Rising,â new Friday on Netflix, everyone is sick. The African president? Seizures. The war criminal? Brain tumors. The U.S. official? Ovarian cyst. The war-crimes lawyer? Prostate cancer.
David Caspe turned 8 in 1986, a year (almost to the day) before the stock market crash that is the ostensible subject of his new Showtime series, âBlack Monday.â I mention that because, watching the show, it often feels like youâre seeing the â80s through the eyes of a precocious youngster glued to the television. Designer jeans, Rae Dawn Chong, âDiffârent Strokes,â Grandmaster Flash, Marion Barry, Michael Jackson, cocaine buffets. Cartoonish characters living large in cartoonish clothes.
As the television reports a terrorist attack on the continent, Raza Shar, the British-born son of Pakistani immigrants, prepares to go out for a night on the town in London. âAnyone picks on you, donât be brave,â his father admonishes him. âTell him youâre a Hindu.â Raza rolls his eyes, nods and recites, âDonât freak, Iâm a Sikh.â
âHanna,â released in 2011, was not a film that called out for a remake or a sequel. It had a singular style, and a delicacy â despite its frequent beatdowns and gunbattles â that would suffer from duplication. Bookended by parallel killings, it was a self-contained chronicle of an obsessive and successful quest for revenge that left no important questions unanswered.
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