Small Screen Potpourri - Some Now, Some Soon - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

This week I gives a heads-up on Prime's Bosch, and FX's What We Do In the Shadows, talk a bit about Epix's War of the Worlds series, the 2011 alien invasion comedy Attack The Block, BBC America/AMC's  Killing Eve, and spend a larger stretch on Netflix's Grace and Frankie.

  I hope the past week's been better to you than you expected. I'm in the group that hasn't been idled - I'm still working, but primarily from home, which involves more than a few, frustrating twists. Whenever I start to grumble to myself that it's not as if I'm "off", I remind myself that I'm still working, as in getting paid every two weeks. Plenty of anxieties, sure, but any of us dependent on a personal performance-based income are going to have those. Were I collecting unemployment and wondering when and if my job is coming back, I'd be wallowing in all of that. So, note to self: It's going much better than it easily could be. For now. (My inner voice can never leave "It could be worse" stand alone. It inevitably adds "And it will be.")
  I'm trying to get official things done, while also aiming to take advantage of an especially flex schedule.
  A few reviews and recommendations again this week, with the largest time spent on one of them. I'll leave that lengthy one for the end.
Bosch will be landing on Amazon Prime a week from today, on April 17th. Continuing a contemporary adaptation of Michael Connelly's novels, it continues to be an odd draw for me because the main character isn't someone I'd like to know as a real person. On the other hand, he's who I'd want on the case if someone did me or someone I cared about in.
  This will be the penultimate season, as they've already approved season seven with the note that that'll be the last one. I've no idea how delayed that'll be due to pretty much every series and movie production on the planet currently being shut down due to the pandemic.
  Here I've posted the trailer for the upcoming season. While the main story arc they're pushing here appears self-contained, I'd highly recommend starting with the first season so as to soak in the characters, especially as there's a great deal of backstory for the lead. The earlier seasons frequently focused on a personal case obsession for the lead, which led to interesting places over the course of the seasons.
  While I'm thinking of it, I want to mention that season six of

   Another even happier return, next Wednesday, April 15th, Vampire sitcom/faux documentary series What We Do In the Shadows returns to FX for the start of its second season. All of season one is available on Hulu, if you haven't already seen it.

    As mentioned last week, as a Fios customer I've gotten Epix free for the month of April.

  One of the things I dove into this past week was their eight-part, contemporarily-set adaptation of War of the Worlds. It was put together by Fox Networks Group and the StudioCanal-backed Urban Myth Films, and was first shown on French tv in 2019.
    Gabriel Byrne and Elizabeth McGovern star in the series, and between much of the setting and a largely French cast, Byrne in particular frequently struck a very gallic profile, or at least so it seemed to me.
    Some hopefully not too spoilery notes -- things I believe I would have liked to have known before going in:
           > If your Essential Elements list for an adaptation of War of the Worlds include one or more of the following - Giant tripods, heat rays, deadly black smoke, huge, desperate battles between earthly artillery and huge alien machines, and a creeping alien weed - then you will be disappointed as none of those are a part of this. The really large-scale death happens suddenly and off-camera, and all the battles are very one-on-one and human scale. It's a very, very loose adaptation, which really just fits the title because it's an alien invasion where the extermination of the human race appears to be the central objective. Independence Day would have more rightly been called War of the Worlds than this miniseries, and we know that would have been a bad tag for that '90s film.
          > This isn't a complete story. At the end of the eighth episode, you're confronted with a partial revelation and new twist. Season two reportedly began production this past October.  It presents some interesting ideas, a great deal involving neuron and brain activity and electromagnetic fields. There were points where I almost admired the lack of sentimentality, as a character here or there which one would have thought in most productions would have been safe, turns out not to be. There are several shades of icky sticky bad relationships and checkered pasts in the mix that may help draw some in, or may just feel like unnecessary baggage the weight and smell of which could tilt one towards asking "I needed to know this... why?"
   I'm glad I had it all available at once to be able to go through at my own pace, because if I'd been watching this in weekly installments over two lunar months I probably would have been disappointed, or even just wandered off mid-way through, where it would have sat with several other series I've yet to get back to finishing.
   I don't regret watching it, but I also can't give it a strong endorsement. I would advise anyone watching it to just come at it as an alien invasion movie, and forget any associations with the H.G. Wells' novel and the various adaptations already out there.
   Yes, I know I posted it as part of last week's piece, but for ease of access here's the trailer for it again.

     In the same general vein, and also currently on Epix, is a 2011 Brit, comedic alien invasion movie I'd not gotten to see until this week: Attack the Block.
    Set in a sketchy, neighborhood in South London, toothy aliens fall from the sky, and come up against a gang of neighborhood teens, would-be toughs who are used to being the predators. Starring two actors who've gained considerable fame in the nine years since this small, financially-underperforming film, we have John Boyega (Finn, from the most recent trio of Star Wars films) as the head of the teen gang, and Jodie Whittaker (Broadchurch, and the current lead in Doctor Who). The film is interesting at a gut level, inasmuch as I suspect a white audience in particular is going to run into some early conflicts on who to root for, as we meet Boyega's Moses and his gang as they rob Whittaker's Sam, a nurse who's trying to make her way home to her flat in the dodgy apartment building she lives in, each wholly unaware that they're neighbors, living in the same building.
   I suspect many in the average audience had an initial reaction as the first of the aliens shows up, pretty much wanting the teens to come to a bad end. The extent to which that changes for the audience as we get to know the kids as people, will likely vary in speed and degree. Had I seen it closer to its release, the familiar face would have solely been that of Nick Frost, who here plays Ron, the affable, neighborhood drug dealer.

     I'd initially forgotten to include Killing Eve, which will be returning this Sunday for it's third season, on both BBC America and AMC. (I'd given a little attention to the series back on the Friday before Christmas, near the end of that week's post.)

    The first two seasons are available on Hulu. I've just, finally, gotten around to watching season two, and enjoyed it greatly. I recall when I finished season one I came away with the sense that while I'd wanted to see more of the titular Eve, I was feeling fairly finished with the psychopathic Villanelle. Season two made me forget whatever was behind that latter attitude. I'm very interested in following the next step for both of these characters.
 
     I don't recall when, but sometime after I came aboard Netflix in 2015, while fishing about, I started to watch the made-for-Netflix comedy series Grace and Frankie. A comedy centered on two very dissimilar women, each in long-term marriages, each well into her 70s. The only link between them being that their husbands were buddies for their entire adult lives, and were partners in their divorce law firm. It also turned out that those husbands had been engaged in an affair with each other for twenty years. The husbands finally decided to come clean with their wives and families, come out, divorce their wives as amicably as possible, and formally become a couple. All of that's from the first episode, and so isn't much of a spoiler.

    Starring Lily Tomlin (Frankie Bergstein) and Jane Fonda (Grace Hanson) as the eponymous leads, the show also stars Sam Waterston (Sol Bergstein) and Martin Sheen (Robert Hanson) as their respective husbands. The situation turns the soon to be ex-wives' lives upside down, throwing together the very straight-laced, appearance-obsessed, business-founding Grace, with the free and artistic spirit, eternal hippie, Frankie. In the tradition of all good buddy comedies it's anything but a smooth and immediately happy blend. However, we find that over time, and with considerable stretches of bad road, that the journey they're on is beneficial to both of them. This late-life friendship of opposites gradually becomes the most significant and honest relationship in their lives, particularly for Grace.

   Anyway, as best I recall I watched the first season or two, then likely lost track of it between seasons, which ultimately gave it the opportunity to build up several more. The latest season, #6, arrived mid-January, which reminded me of the show and more recently brought me around to picking up where I left off.
   Somewhere along the way I confused a bit of peripheral information, and so came at my return to the series with the idea that it had been canceled/ the cast and crew decided to end it as of that sixth season. So, I watched through to the end of season six, thinking that the season ender was a series ender, leaving us at another turning point. It was only after finishing, when I went to look for behind-the-scenes details to see (among other things) who had seven will be the final one. Moreover, that final season is set to be 16 episodes, three more than each of the previous six seasons, so giving us plenty of time for a good wrap.

really pulled the plug, that I happily found out that the announcement of a series end was that season
    Filming of season seven began January 27th. However, the coronavirus pandemic put a halt to all production (for this and every other Netflix production, as it has to every other tv and movie project I was trying to keep tabs on) by mid-March. A world suspended.
   So, we've no idea when that'll resume production, much less when this will place the final season's return -- obviously hoping all involved remain healthy and fit through this global event. In the meantime there are those six seasons, 78 episodes, roughly 25 minutes each, waiting for anyone who hasn't already taken a look.
   I've found it to be a good mix of comedic tensions, and while most of the comedy comes from people being forced out of their comfort zones and into situations not of their choosing, it almost completely avoided the Lucille Ball formula of forced and protracted uncomfortable situations that has so come to bother me as an adult, and which still is the main barrier for me in warming up to The Office - either version. In fact, there was only one episode in the series that gave me that uncomfortable knife twist and forced grin in lieu of humor, and that's the season four, episode three scenes involving a "wacky" break-in and bluff scheme.

    The leads and the supporting cast are all terrific, and they deliver something that's alternately humanly real and warm, and madcap, sometimes simultaneously depending on which character.you're most closely identifying with. Are there plot holes, or at least weaknesses? Sure. It's a sitcom, and much has to be packed into an episode. Could someone in a more cynical mood quickly take away the reminder that life is funnier and more easily navigated so long as one or more of the players has a lot of cash to draw on? Sure. It all worked for me, though. Humor, warmth, reflection, growth, and hope. All things I'm drawn to more than ever.
    That's hopefully enough for this week. As ever, feel free to leave any comments, reactions or whatever down below.
    Take care, and if you can't stay sane, try to fake it. People are getting nervous enough as it is.    -Mike

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