More Goth-tinged Noir and a Sometimes Hopeful Look Ahead - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

Another week with a sudden, "Wha-happened?!" flip from Endless Week to Almost Over.
However we got here, it's Friday again.
This week saw a couple shows I've followed with great interest hit the end of their run - one for a season, the other, presumably, for the series.

 Better Call Saul (AMC) ended its fifth season Monday night, having brought me another very well-received, over entirely too quickly, season of this mostly prequel series. Fans of the show continue to wonder what's going to have become of a key supporting character in this series -- someone who's dearer to the main character than any other living person, yet someone we never saw either in the later events in Breaking Bad, nor in the brief times we're spending in the present, well after the events of Breaking Bad.
 This was the penultimate season for the show, and it's left me to wonder a couple things.
   One, how much the production shut-downs for COVID-19 will mean in terms of delays for the next season. Hopefully it won't cost them any people on either side of the camera. Also, whereas some shows to be shot presumably later this year may decide to work this global event into their scripts -- and Saul likely will do it, too, with season-bookending elements set in the present -- the bulk of each season of Saul is set much earlier in this century.
   Two, how well they'll be able to get around the impact of social-distancing habits in filming scenes. This is something I'm wondering broadly about when filming on most shows eventually resumes. Will we see sudden spaces between characters? More reliance on odd angle shots? Or will we have odd sort of season shoot communes form, where all of the of the pre-production work is done in physical isolation, then insisting on everyone who's going to be physically involved in a shoot being required to isolate for several weeks at a controlled location, everyone being tested at least once, and then go for a very tight shooting schedule where everyone stays at a central location until the shooting is completed. I'm thinking they'll likely take these and other lessons from what I've read happened in the porn industry in the wake of HIV, when they needed to assure all of the cast... and their insurance carriers.
     (The 13-episode final season aired in two blocks, coming to a halt mid-August of 2022. All six seasons are streaming on Netflix, though I expect that in time they'll become AMC+ exclusive.)
   The other series that wrapped -- also Monday -- and in this case it's presumably a wrap on the project as a whole, was The Plot Against America (HBO). Sticking primarily with a Jewish-American family, it explores an alternate history where Right Wing extremist Republicans got Charles Lindbergh to run for president in 1940 against FDR, as an "America First" candidate pledging to keep the U.S. out of another "European" war. Dark and thoroughly engaging, the six-part miniseries held my attention through to the final scenes. Unsettling in some part due to some elements echoed in our own times, in this election year.
   Since last time I did get back to watching the rest of the episodes of the science fiction anthology series Tales From the Loop (Amazon Prime) and am happy to say that while it still has some plotting problems, they didn't lead with their best material. It remains a series that's more invested in high concepts and human moments than in air-tight plotting, and on the whole I found it a little more downbeat than I might have liked -- occasionally giving me a sense of dreary wonder -- but I still think it was worth the time.
   As the stories roll out, it becomes clearer that not only are they all linked by the locale, and the mysterious work being done beneath the townspeople's feet, but that it also links the characters, often by blood, marriage and friendship.
  Now,. looking ahead, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the second season of the Ricky Gervais serial After Life has just appeared on Netflix. I remember enjoying the first series, and not being sure if we were going to see anything more of it. Here I'm digging up the trailer for season one rather than for this new season, I'm not exactly sure why. I guess I'm just expecting that most people hadn't given it a look the first time around.
  Gervais has made a career often out of being an arse to people, but I think it's often with good intent.
  I'm not going to pretend it's high art, and this is certainly saccharine at points (thought not to the extremes of Derek -- which I also admit having enjoyed), but I sometimes (well, maybe more than sometimes these days) need an ongoing story about second chances and moving ahead with one's life, however reluctantly, after a devastating loss.

   As with that first season, the new one is just six episodes. I'll most likely be disappearing into this as Friday allows. (I'll add here, four years later, that the series went on to have a third and final season. Gervais likes to have these projects be complete. I haven't revisited it since watching the final season back in January of 2022, but my impression of it all was positive. The main character is very much Gervais' surrogate all the way down to the atheism, which mostly works for me but which I know is one of the reasons some people don't care for him. This show is something one could have their emotional defenses up against, I suppose, and refuse to be manipulated... but why bother watching much of anything then?  It got some smiles and tears out of me by the end.)
    Bringing us back to our largely shelter-at-home present, tonight (10 pm Eastern, on AMC) will see the second episode of the Zoom meeting series Friday Night In with The Morgans.
   Actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Walking Dead's Negan, and Supernatural patriarch John Winchester among many roles) and his wife check in from home with various friends, some of whom are also actors. It's a half hour of timely fluff, that's going to vary in personal interest with whoever they happen to check in with. Sure, it has elements of possible aggravation as we contrast our own situations with that of celebrities "sheltering" in spacious, well-provided circumstances, and it's entirely possible I'll quickly tire of it. For now, though, it's just half an hour (less once one skips the commercials -- which I do since I handle this as I do everything I watch on commercial tv, by letting the DVR catch it) and Morgan remains entertaining enough to be a good anchor for it.
     Here's a segment from the first episode, as all of them have since been posted in sections over on YouTube. (The original link I had here had been pulled somewhere along the line.)

   Offered more (at least so far) as little more than a simple notice, Netflix also premiered their latest action flick today: Extraction.
   I've only watched the trailer, and sometimes those aren't the best representations of a film. Based on that, though, I'm more than slightly disappointed that Chris Hemsworth + the Russo Brothers yielded what seems to be an unintentionally comedically by-the-numbers special ops rescue film. Still, your mileage may vary. I was mildly stunned to see some positive reactions from people over the age of 11 to last year's Michael Bay-directed Ryan Reynolds vigilante caper film, 6 Underground, which was also a Netflix production. (And which I briefly talked about back on December 13th.)
  Anyway, here's the trailer for this new offering:

    Over on Showtime, this Sunday sees a new series that's at least a themed spin-off from an earlier one.
     It's been four years (WOW! It's actually been four years?!) since the final curtain dropped on the third and final season of the often over-sexed, Victorian-era supernatural, public domain character monsterfest Penny Dreadful.
     This Sunday night (10pm Eastern) sees the first episode of Penny Dreadful: City of Angels.
     Set roughly some 50 years later, and roughly half a world away, it's 1938 Los Angeles. The Golden Age of Hollywood. A place rich at the time with Mexican-American tensions and folklore, complete with intrigues of Nazi influences via the German-American Bund, and the rise of radio televangelism. Seemingly as part of this mix we have an actual, shape-shifting demon, Magda (played by Natalie Dormer).
   Evil seems well-represented in many forms, raising the question of who or what might even try to stand against it. With more than enough simple, human evil in play, it almost seems unfair and distracting to have an actual demon in the mix.From what I've seen so far, as interesting as Dormer is to watch and listen do, I do wonder if the overtly supernatural threat won't end up being distracting - in a bad way - overkill.

      I think my biggest challenge here will be in not getting hung up on the title, which might lead me to be constantly scanning for an appearance by one or more of the characters from that earlier series -- of which, offhand, there's no sign in the cast.
    Said cast includes Nathan Lane as one of the main characters, and Brent Spiner as a supporting one.
    Instead, I'll push myself to recall that the "penny dreadful" title is a call-back to lurid, 19th century fiction, printed on the cheapest paper available, and just allow this new series to be its own thing.
   As a Showtime series this will be rolling out in weekly installments. Nearly all the information I have is for six episodes, though imdb references eight, albeit no titles for the last two, with this running through at least the very end of May. (As it turned out, there 10 episodes in that first and only season of the show.)
   As mentioned up top, this week went from a sense of boundless time and possibility to one of crushing deadline, seemingly in an instant, so vague plans for some other mentions slipped away yet again.
 I hope you're all staying as safe and sane as possible, have some hopeful dot on the horizon, however vague, and have at least one friendly ear to vent to. It makes a universe of a difference.                - Mike

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