Video Distractions - by Mike N.

Friday once more!
     
      While other items kept me from getting around to it until the new work week began, I still ended up blazing through all eight episodes of the third season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which appeared this time last week on Amazon Prime. As it turns out, I was the relative exception in waiting past the weekend to start. Based on a combination of opening weekend views and another wave of Golden Globe and Screen Actor's Guild nominations, Amazon green lit season four by the following Thursday.

      A period show originally set in 1958, now at the start of the '60s this third season of the show follows the titular Miriam "Midge" Maisel as she heads out on her first tour as a stand-up comic, opening on the road for a singer she deeply impressed during the second season. An opportunity that revived her dream just when she was ready to throw in the towel.
     Cutting back to a trim eight episodes after having swelled (but not bloated - I enjoyed it all) to ten for its sophomore season, the show maintains its scintillating, rapid-fire character pace, entertaining and leaving me interested in more news of virtually every character. Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, otherwise best known for The Gilmore Girls, which was also well known for its snappy pace and dialogue, and which I was surprised how much I enjoyed as I binged through its seven seasons on the way to the 4-part Netflix capper a few years ago. But that's its own matter.

    Back to Maisel: Rachel Brosnahan as the titular lead, Alex Borstein as her manager, Susie, and Tony Shaloub as Miriam's father, Abe, have all deservedly won awards for their roles in the series. This season each of them, and several other characters, continue to develop.
    No word so far on whether or not it will be wrapping with that fourth season or aiming to go on to a fifth. Amy Sherman-Palladino's stated that she knows how the series will end, but not yet when.

   A dramatic series debuted, also on Amazon Prime, back on November 22nd: The Feed.

   Set in a London of the near future, the plot revolves around a wildly popular, society-changing social media technology that's already deeply entrenched at a global level by the start of the series -- the titular Feed. It's a physically-embedded, neurologically-wired tech that brings the virtual world and instant connectivity directly to the brains of its users. The result is a world where the majority of the developed world is filled with people who instead of constantly staring at cell phone screens, simply look mildly glazed most of the time as the Feed brings information, reality enhancements and virtual scenes into the user's view. A significant and central element of the Feed's enhancement are "mundles" -- memory bundles. As the tech is directly wired into users' nervous systems, their experiences are reduced to data, and the Feed allows that data, those full, audio-visual and visceral memories, to be saved, replayed. and even shared. At its simplest level, much as modern phones have become still and video cameras, enabling people to casually capture and chronicle their everyday experiences, here we have a world where this can literally be done at a glance.

  Of course, something wrong soon begins to happen, as incidents of bizarre, initially semi-catatonic and then violent behavior begin to manifest. Initial resistance to the idea that it's directly related to the tech gradually gives way to concerns as to whether it's a technical glitch, the growing pains of a rapidly-developing technology, or the act of terrorists.
  Much of the series centers on the tech dynasty, the Hatfields, behind this world-revolutionizing technology. As we learn more about their version of the world, and the dark problems beginning to manifest, we also find out more about the family, their relationships, and their tricky, sometimes troubling history.
   Season one was released in the UK back in September on Virgin TV Ultra HD (yeah, I have no idea -- we're drowning in these proliferating platforms), and as mentioned above it was added to Prime Video in late November.

   Based on a science fiction novel of the same name by Nick Clark Windo, there is source material for this to potentially run for several seasons. The arc of this first season very obviously is meant to lead into at least a second, but as of this writing no one seems to be sure whether or not a nod's likely to be give, or most pointedly if someone's willing to foot the bill.
   In this age of original streaming content no one really seems to know exactly what to do. The idea of ratings is slippier than ever, and agreements of ownership and exclusivity are critical as those in charge of these streaming services are trying to put money into content that will drive people to sign up and remain subscribers. As viewers, the hope is that this will press these services to understand the importance of providing relatively complete series, but that's still not risen to a level where we're not still seeing orphaned content -- series that get us interested only to unsatisfyingly fade out without an ending.
  Still, even just taking it as far as it exists, this debut season, it's sufficiently interesting to recommend. The cast does a nice job, and given the range of roles some of them have had it's likely that some of the faces and voices will pop for you. The most obvious one for me was seeing Michelle Fairley, who I'll likely always primarily think of as Catelyn Stark, from back when Game of Thrones was still deservedly a big deal. Here she plays Meredith Hatfield, the matriarch of the tech family behind the Feed.
  The intended parallels to our own increasingly tech-meshed lives are obvious, and many of the fundamental questions raised are not so terribly far off the mark that it isn't useful to consider the implications, even though the tech involved in the show rapidly recedes deeper and deeper into fictional territory.
  So, with the dual warnings that there's no guarantee we'll be seeing the rest of the story, and that, unlike the world of Mrs. Maisel, some of these characters will become anything but your favorite people, this 10-episode sci-fi series may be worth your checking it out.

  Now for a couple of items appearing today, which I've yet to see.

  While the trailer seems so dreadfully formulaic and so very, very, Michael Bay in all of the most unflattering ways, I may get myself to take a look at the movie dropping today on Netflix: 6 Underground.

At this point most of the drive for watching it is largely inertia - when it was just a quick premise about an ultra-rich man deciding to go big league crimefighter, with Ryan Reynolds in the lead, and that Neflix was funding this original production to the staggering tune of $150 million it caught my attention enough to have me add it to the list of things to take a look at - and the rest is the simple desire for escapism that ramped up as my week turned sour near the end. Added to that now is the curiosity to see if the film could be as awful as the trailer. I suspect it should come with a viewer warning about potential loss of IQ points. Here's to low expectations and the slim possibility it'll be better than they're advertising.

   I did end up watching it, though I had to take a break partway through, as it wobbled between mind-numbingly formulaic and skirted being self-parody. I found myself imagining some ten year-old taking this in as if it were the holy grail of slick action movies, then skipped him along another fifteen years to when he revisited it and is smacked with shame over having ever thought so highly of it. (There's a potential topic for a future column: Films and shows that were either beloved or hated, but which did a polar flip when revisited many years later.) I'm not sure what director Bay and star Reynolds took home for this, but it seem likely that the bulk of the $150 million budget went into stunts, effects and pyrotechnics. It didn't go into the script.

   More optimistically (okay, very, slightly so, as the season trailer is arch and vaguely embarrassing), fans of comics-to-screen projects also have season three - which will be the final one - of Marvel's Runaways dropping today over on Hulu.
   That's another 10-episode run. I've no idea where the series lets off, and whether or not the producers knew this would be the end of the road when they wrote, shot and edited this season. I won't pretend for a moment that the first two seasons of this series have been some stellar television, but I was modestly entertained and drawn in when I binged through them shortly after getting a Hulu account. I had next to no knowledge of the source material, so deviant choices made for the show weren't a big issue for me; to the contrary, I'm glad they didn't try to stick to what I know of the comics when it comes to who the kids' parents are.
    While supposedly, nominally placed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was scant to no evidence of it in the first two seasons - take that as good or ill by your own lights. Side note: This season marks a character crossover with another, already-cancelled, nominally MCU-based series - Cloak & Dagger.

 
   Hey, if you have Disney+ you can cut over there to see this week's episode of The Mandalorian. And this Sunday we'll see whether or not Lindelof and company, who've been doing such a nice job with the Watchmen series on HBO, can manage to stick the landing. This is me attempting to end this on an up beat.

   Next week we'll be rolling into what for many of us will be a Christmas/Hanukkah to New Year's break, when much more new material is set to appear.
     
   Here's to a good weekend for all of us, and for next week to be better and more hopeful than this one.
                                                                                              -Mike N.

  Shows and movies hit on in previous posts:

 Sept. 20th: Mindhunter (Netflix)
     Sept. 27th: What's The Matter With Helen, The French Connection, and Frenzy. (Early '70s R-rated movies I saw with my mom)
     Oct. 3rd:    Preacher (AMC), Stumptown (ABC), Sunnyside (NBC), The Good Place (NBC), and Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime).
     Oct. 11th:  Joker (still in theaters), and In The Tall Grass (Netflix)
     Oct. 18th:  El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (Netflix)
     Oct. 25th: Dolemite Is My Name (Netflix)
     Nov. 1st:   Watchmen (HBO series), The Kominsky Method (Netflix)
     Nov. 8th:   Seconds (1966 movie, currently available as part of Amazon Prime)
     Nov. 15th: Dr. Sleep (current theatrical release, but probably not for long), Horace and Pete (2016 web-produced series, currently on Hulu)
     Nov. 22nd: NOS4A2 (AMC, now on Hulu) and Man In The High Castle (Amazon Prime)
     Nov. 29th: The Irishman (Netflix), The Mandalorian and The World According To Jeff Goldblum (both on Disney+), light touches on Watchmen (HBO) and Ray Donovan (Showtime)
     Dec, 6th: The Booth At the End (Amazon Prime), and Us (HBO).

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