Amazon Prime’s “The Girlfriend” gets a boost from the locations. (Photo by Christopher Raphael/Prime)
There’s a bumper crop of great acting talent on offer among recent streaming titles.
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Steve Murray’s monthly musings on TV in Atlanta and beyond.
PRIME VIDEO
Like last month’s leading recommendation (The Hunting Wives), here comes another guilty-pleasure binge — only, you know, like, classy. Amazon Prime’s The Girlfriend isn’t a show you want to boast about watching. It’s basically a high-end cat fight. Still, while its two lead characters backstab and bloodily sabotage each other, you can luxuriate in its high-end locations in London and the Spanish countryside. It’s posh trash.
Executive Producer Robin Wright (who sleekly directs the first three of the six episodes) plays Laura Sanderson, owner of an art gallery, wife to wealthy property developer Howard (Waleed Zuaiter) and mother of med student Daniel (Laurie Davidson). Fulfilling the demands of this female-centric sort of show, adapted from a Michelle Frances novel, the men are very good-looking and basically useless.
Laura and Daniel, her only (living!) child, dote on each other in the Oedipal way that Sigmund Freud built his career on. Their literally steamy sauna scene in the first episode makes you want to shout “boundaries!” That bond gets threatened (in Laura’s mind, anyway) when Daniel brings home the fabulously named Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke from HBO’s House of the Dragon), a stunner in tight dresses who works for a realty firm. Laura welcomes her with a hug (“We don’t do formal here”), but soon she’s questioning Cherry’s claim to have gone to the snooty private school her best friend’s daughter attended, she witnesses Cherry punch out some bloke in the street and she suspects the young woman stole one of her pricey bracelets while visiting their family home.
But … this is Laura’s side of the story. Each episode is split between the women’s differing points of view. It’s a shrewd borrowing from Akira Kurosawa’s unreliable-narrator masterpiece, Rashomon. So, sure, Cherry grew up in a working-class family (her mom is a butcher), but isn’t it a good thing that she’s a social striver? And isn’t Laura’s closeness to Daniel bordering on sick? Or is Cherry a gold digger, vacuum-packed in those dresses for maximum erotic impact on Laura’s poor, innocent son?
Until the end of episode 4, when one character’s cruelty passes the point of redemption, the women seem pretty equally matched. We’re happy to flip-flop our loyalties as the series alternates their POVs. Even after that character crosses (for me, at least) that moral Rubicon, Girlfriend maintains its campy/sinister allure.
NETFLIX
Just forget about the man Vince (Jason Bateman) runs over — twice! — with a car in the opening minutes of Black Rabbit. You can forget about him, because the show does, too. Vince is a likely murderer (we never find out if the victim survived), but we’re supposed to root for him as one of the two leads in this drama. The second one is Jake (Jude Law), Vince’s kid brother. The two once had a one-hit-wonder band, the Black Rabbits. Years later, Jake has parlayed that whiff of fame into the restaurant that gives the series its name, a chic-shabby bistro in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The Black Rabbit is hopping (I’m hilarious, right?), so when Vince calls him post hit-and-run from the West Coast, it’s really the worst time for Jake to send airfare to a man who’s reliable for only one thing: unreliability. That’s what happens, though. Back in New York, Vince embroils Jake and his restaurant in a jewelry heist, arson for an insurance payout and debt to a very scary loan shark (Oscar winner Troy Kotsur, elevating every scene he’s in).
If The Girlfriend kept forcing us to recalibrate our sympathies toward the two lead characters, that doesn’t happen here. Vince starts off as a user and a loser, and Jake is his patsy. It’s a folie à deux from the first episode to the eighth, which takes forever to get to. Law, a powerful actor with considerable range, does heroic work trying to make us buy Jake’s devotion to his rotten sibling. But the show’s creators, Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, give him a premise that just doesn’t work. That’s largely due to one crucial bit of miscasting.
Bateman is at his best playing a regular guy staying afloat in a world of mounting chaos, whether comical (Arrested Development) or deadly (his Georgia-shot Netflix show Ozark). As the agent of pandemonium himself, he’s hard to fully believe. He’s too familiar, too guy-next-door. Even when Vince is acting his worst, the performance always feels this close to veering into a comic riff. On the plus side, he nicely directs a couple of the show’s episodes. (So does his Ozark costar and screen spouse, Laura Linney.)
In the final hour, Vince tells his brother, “I’m just bad news, man.” It’s a way-too-late revelation, one viewers came to about eight hours earlier … along with that poor, forgotten guy Vince ran over.
Another new Netflix series that looks better on paper than on-screen, Wayward plucks vintage paranoia elements from Harvest Home, The Stepford Wives, The Wicker Man and Rosemary’s Baby in a tale of a picture-perfect small town that conceals (barely) a Dark Secret.
The great Toni Collette plays Evelyn Wade. The show’s Big Bad, Evelyn, is the seemingly touchy-feely founder and on-hands guru of Tall Pines, a private academy in Vermont tailored for what in the olden days would have been called, yes, wayward youth. The students’ curriculum of behavioral modification includes ego-shredding group encounter sessions called the Hot Seat, where a student has to listen to their classmates’ harsh teardowns, then thank them for the feedback. The newest students are teens Leila and Abbie (Alyvia Alyn Lind and Sydney Topliffe), who spend most of the series bonding and feuding and bonding again.
The show was created by nonbinary comedian Mae Martin, here playing police officer Alex, who moves with his pregnant wife Laura (Sarah Gadon, unable to rescue an unlikable character) to Laura’s hometown — you guessed it, Tall Pines. Maybe the first sign that the town is a little, um, off is the no-sweat embrace of this trans man with a gun. Alex is welcomed into the burg’s station house and treated, suspiciously, like just another beer-drinkin’ bro with a badge. Soon he’s sniffing out the deeper weirdness of his new home, but the show is neither surprising, scary nor funny enough.
Collette keeps you watching, but only up to a point. Her Evelyn has some great moments. She’s what I’d call “violently holistic,” chirpily thanking her dinner hosts for “a soul-enriching meal” and enthusing to a student about the way the school’s rigors will catalyze her into an entirely different person: “I can’t wait for you to meet her!” But similar to Bateman’s in Black Rabbit, her work here feels more like a performance than a lived-in character. Like the rest of the show, it feels like a rough draft.
There’s a rich seed buried deep in Wayward’s elements. It had the potential to explore — whether through satire, horror or sincere drama — the question of why “intergenerational trauma” has become a driving sociological narrative in our culture, for better and worse. The show ultimately doesn’t have the strength of its convictions. No, scratch that. The problem is, it doesn’t have any perceptible convictions. It’s a collection of genre plot points, delivered routinely.
Also on Netflix, the aggressively cozy crowd pleaser Thursday Murder Club is the kind of thing you’d expect from a middle-of-the-road director like Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire, Nine Months, Bicentennial Man and the two least interesting Harry Potter flicks ). Based on the book series by Richard Osman, the club of the title includes Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), Ron (Pierce Brosnan), Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) and Joyce (Celia Imrie), residents of a luxe assisted living home in the British countryside. There, they gather weekly to pore over unsolved cold cases and try to figure out whodunnit.
Cute, right? Pointedly, in one scene, Elizabeth instructs Joyce to delete “bright-eyed, feisty old ladies” from her vocabulary. It’s a nice line, but it only underscores the easy, twee-zy nature of the whole enterprise. The members of this club, male or female, are bright-eyed, feisty and old. (At one point, Joyce must “adorably” ask, “What does ‘WTF’ mean?”)
The mystery, in the first of what will likely be a series of films, isn’t really that interesting. But it draws in fine stage-and-screen actors like David Tennant, Jonathan Pryce, Naomie Ackie and Daniel Mays. You can’t really begrudge the mildness of it all. Director Columbus is dully competent, but everyone else involved are highest-caliber professionals.
Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots in All of You. (Photo courtesy of Apple TV+)
APPLE TV+
There’s an interesting, sub-Black Mirror sci-fi premise in the original movie All of You. In the near-ish future, if they have the money to pay for it, people can take a test to locate (chemically? genetically? it’s never explained) their true soulmate. Simon (Brett Goldstein) foots the bill for his BFF from university days, Laura (Imogen Poots), secretly thinking they are each other’s One and Only. The test says otherwise.
Built as a series of theatrical-feeling scenes that keep propelling us into the characters’ futures, the movie tracks Simon and Laura as they navigate her marriage to a stellar fellow named Lukas (Steven Kree) and his romances with women (Zawe Ashton, Jenna Coleman) who are perfectly lovely but just aren’t Laura. When the two of them inevitably fall into each other’s arms and start planning picturesque dirty weekends behind their partners’ backs, the theatrical feeling of the movie clicks into place: It’s Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, only without the reverse chronology.
Co-written by Goldstein (my favorite actor in Ted Lasso) and director William Bridges (wouldn’t you know it; he’s directed three episodes of Black Mirror), the movie’s sci-fi gimmick turns out to be a red herring. As well as Betrayal, All of You wants to be a modern Brief Encounter; you can feel the script (and Goldstein’s fine but limited performance) straining for emotional effect. The unexpected consequence of the movie is that the longer you spend time with Simon and Laura, the less you care whether they get together for keeps. The movie feels like a loaded argument for the nobility of adultery but also an excuse to avoid commitment.
ODDS AND ENDS
Now that you can binge all eight episodes of Alien: Earth at once, I recommend it. None of the film sequels ever touched the one-two punch of the original Alien and Aliens by Ridley Scott and James Cameron, respectively. But Fargo’s Noah Hawley teases out one of the series’ central themes: Are murderous alien species any worse than the inhuman billionaires who run massive corporations? The Hulu show also explores identity in fascinating ways with a cast of biological humans, synths (or androids), cyborgs (mechanically enhanced people) and a new category: hybrids. These are a half dozen androids with the memories and personalities of terminally ill children, downloaded into synthetic bodies by mad genius billionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin, detestable) and renamed after Peter Pan’s lost boys.
Both gleefully gory and philosophical, the show has uneven bits but a strong cast including Timothy Olyphant, Essie Davis and Babou Ceesay. It features one of the best tag-team performances I’ve seen this year, from Adarsh Gourav and Jonathan Ajayi as Slightly and Smee. Boys downloaded into men’s bodies, they’re adorable, and very scary, in their innocence.
Though it’s not streaming yet on any subscription platforms (it will likely hit HBO Max next month), the Georgia-shot Weapons is a great Halloween rental. From Barbarians writer-director Zach Cregger, it follows the aftermath of the mysterious, middle-of-the-night disappearance of a classroom of students taught by tipsy schoolteacher Julia Garner. The less you know about the plot the better.
The cast includes Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong and VIP Amy Madigan. A few years ago, Wayward’s Toni Collette was overlooked for an Oscar nomination for her stunning, terrifying turn in Hereditary. Madigan’s work here comes from a different, skewed angle, both hilarious and creepy. Here’s hoping her performance doesn’t face the same anti-horror prejudice when awards season comes around.
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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous column here.
