What's To Watch? - Apr 7-13 - Power, Will & Authority

 

     This past Friday Amazon Prime launched a new, British, science fiction drama series about a world whose power structure is suddenly and dramatically changed. A sudden development in teenage girls around the globe, that soon spreads to most older women.  What happens when men, for the first time, have to come to grips with women holding the quiet threat of violent menace in the world, having to be wary that they don't offend or upset a random woman for fear that she might take offense and lash out.      It's The Power

      Good cast - including multiple actors likely to pop - and an engaging premise.
      Based on Naomi Alderman's 2016 novel of the same name, it will run nine episodes. The first three landed last week - and I would advise watching those three more or less as a unit, as it introduces characters around the globe and gathers the story pitch. It starts, briefly, with a glimpse of a changed world, then rolls back a mere six months to show us how it came about. Episode four arrives today, the remaining five - one each Friday - through May 12th.

     My latest catch-up on an Apple TV+ series is a comedy-drama one, co-created by Bill Lawrence (among other things creator of Scrubs and one of the co-creators of Ted Lasso), Jason Segel (who also co-stars), and Brett Goldstein (who also plays Roy Kent in Ted Lasso), focusing on therapy. Segel plays a therapist, largely crippled by grief, who embarks on an ethically questionable path with his patients as he tries to simultaneously help them and himself. Co-starring Harrison Ford, Jessica Williams, and Michael Urie. It's Shrinking

     Being based in an arena of therapy, it plays with comedy built on and connected to tragedies, loss, relationship failures, aging and illness... which can be tricky. It's uneven and is playing a relative long game, so I could see some viewers ditching it because the characters took too long to endear themselves. I watched the season this past week, and am generally interested in seeing season two, presumably sometime next year.
     The full, 10-episode first season is available - it wrapped in March, with a second season already greenlit.

     Just noting it, I saw that the first, 13-episode season of The Winchesters (a series on the CW) arrived on HBO Max this week. This is the spin-off prequel for Supernatural, which ran for fifteen seasons. This newer show aims to tell the story of how Sam and Dean's parents, John Winchester and Mary Campbell, met, fought monsters together, and searched for their missing fathers.

     Now, I was (and still am) a huge fan of Supernatural, but nothing I've seen so far has shifted me from the opinion that this prequel series is a bad, cluttering move. Flashbacks, including some time travel stories, during Supernatural's run gave us ample background on family history, and it's difficult to see how trying to retroactively cram in more backstory is a good idea. The later seasons of the show that expended on the family backstory occasionally felt a little shaky as it was, but I was pretty comfortable with the idea of Sam and Dean's father really only picking up the monster-hunter mantle in the wake of his wife's untimely death.

     My attitude toward the concept, combined with viewing time competition and limited DVR space only found me trying to watch the first episode of the new series, and then skipping the rest for at least then. Now that it's on HBO Max I can take a look at leisure, though I'm still not sure when or even if I will. It's almost entirely because of Jenson Ackles' involvement - both his production company (Chaos Machine) and his acting as narrator - that there's even this level of possible consideration.
     If you were a Supernatural fan and want to weigh in on the yea or nay of The Winchesters, please do. In the meantime, if I do get around to giving it a fresh look, I'll make mention of it.

     Arriving on Netflix April 13th is a seven-episode limited series, conjuring with a cascade of misadventures as an ex-cop is pressed by a debt to return to his home state of Florida, to find a Philly mobster's runaway girlfriend. Complications mount, including various family skeletons and problematic schemes.
     Building thematically on a popular meme, it's Florida Man

      Returning to HBO Max starting April 13th is the second half of the fourth (and final) season of DC comics' adaptation Titans. It should be two episodes then, with one per week to follow through the series finale May 11th.

     As with Doom Patrol, which will be back for its final 6 episodes sometime yet this year, 2022's regime change for the now Warner Bros. Discovery, dried up most money for direct-to-streaming items like these. There are indications of some confusion - what seems to have been some false hope - that it might manage a season five, and that may have led to some ill-considered decisions for the season four finale. The ambiguity about when we'll be seeing those final episodes may be in some late work being done to try to tidy the final episode. We're too far outside of the process to say for sure.

     Ongoing shows I've mentioned once or more in previous columns:
     The final season of Star Trek: Picard (Paramount+) is down to its final two episodes, with episode eight dropping yesterday, with some behind-the-scenes rumbles about a possible, but not yet officially authorized, Star Trek: Legacies series spinning out from this. That's getting ahead of matters, though. The Next Generation cast is reassembled and heading into the endgame for this current series.
     The obituary of the week sitcom Not Dead Yet (ABC, which I've been catching via Hulu) also had its 8th episode arrive this week, returning after several weeks, refining and developing the core characters. I'd spent a few moments on the series a couple weeks back. My general impression is that while it's not hemorrhaging viewers, it's been losing them along the way, though tracking how people are watching series - between DVR and streaming options - continues to confuse matters in the

broadcast industry, where the ads are the real financial focus while more and more of us work our way around them one way or another.
     Apple TV+'s Ted Lasso continues to roll out its final season with a new episode each Wednesday. This past week brought us episode four, "The Big Week", so the first third of this 12-episode final season is in place. Continuing to enjoy is as it comes, looking forward to the rest, and trying not to rush the mourning.

     At the Free For All end of things this week, I came across a made-for-tv movie from 1976. It's a fictionalized version of the Stanley Milgram obedience research experiments conducted at Yale in the early 1960s, investigating how willing people can be to follow orders even when they believed they are inflicting pain - worse, on an escalating scale - on others for failing to obey. The key was the dependence on a sense of Authority. It was ultimately an investigation into how abuses in institutions and, then not even two decades past the era of the Third Reich, how so many people could commit so many atrocities in the name of "following orders."
     Starring William Shatner, and Ozzie Davis, it was also a tv debut for Stephen Macht and Lindsay Crouse. It's The Tenth Level

     Shot on videotape rather than film, it was originally intended to be shown during December of 1975, but advertisers didn't want to touch it. It was finally shown in late August of the following year, as a Playhouse 90 screening. As best I can tell it has never been officially released on video or DVD.
     The curious choices in fictionalizing it, along with renaming the people, was in deciding to make Professor Turner (the fictional version of Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist who created and ran the experiment at Yale in 1961) a WASP rather than a Jew.
     Over on HBO Max, a generally more successful, and much less fictionalized version of the story of those infamous experiments stars Peter Sarsgaard as social psychologist Stanley Milgram, and a cast that includes Winona Ryder, Jim Gaffigan, Anthony Edwards, John Leguizamo (who, coincidentally, is also part of The Power's cast, back up top this week), and the late Anton Yelchin.
     It goes well beyond the original experiments to give a fuller picture of Milgram's life and career, along with the public perceptions and reactions to his work, and even such things as The Tenth Level. It includes archival footage of the real people and experimental situations involved, and has Milgram (Sarsgaard) breaking the fourth wall, speaking directly to the film's audience. It's Experimenter (2015  R  98m)

     I don't watch broadcast tv, or at least not from a live feed, so commercials generally go by me in the dark, and that includes network promotions for their own shows and movies. While it's been some years since I've watched it, especially as a kid there were many years where we indulged the annual (roughly) Eastertime airing on ABC of The Ten Commandments (1956). It's funny how culturally blind I was on it, it explicitly being centered on the story of Moses, and so of Exodus, and tied to Passover, but the mainstream push was always to somehow associate it with Easter. We had no interface with Passover.
     Anyway, I saw too late that ABC ran it this past weekend, ahead of the start of Passover this Wednesday sundown. While I haven't pulled the trigger on it, I may buy a digital copy of the extended version off Amazon later today. That would be about ten bucks. Or maybe the momentary desire will pass. Even just watching the trailer reminds me of how overwrought, or at least Of Its Time the film was. The little kid inside, if honest about it, mostly just wants to revisit the plagues and the cartoon miracles. The older me would add the kick of revisiting the various starts populating the production.

     That's all from me for this week. Loads to do out in the so-called Real World, where every day is a triage... or else nothing gets done. Take care, I wish you a pleasant Easter, Passover, or simply weekend, as best applies to you and yours. See you back here next Friday. - Mike