Ricky Tenderkiss

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As of episode 1, this series seems quite good: Kate Winslet as a damaged, brittle, charismatic know-nothing who stumbles into power through “democratic” elections in an erstwhile dictatorship her father ran … and a retinue of self-serving hangers-on who realize enabling Winslet is both potentially their own death sentence, yet also their easiest route to gaining unearned power. Of course the U.S. Chamber of Commerce/State Department also lurks in the wings, looking to gain exclusive control of the country’s mineral wealth: Winslet’s country would retain only a 49% stake in its own cobalt and no say in its mining, but the U.S. investor promises with a wink to still treat the oppressed locals fairly. The U.S. is only concerned over the optics of Winslet’s tyranny — a recent military massacre of protesting miners is treated as a public relations problem rather than as a human rights violation — and the corridors of power in Winslet’s administrative palace are literally hermetically sealed off from the world outside. Winslet is perfectly believable as the self-deluded, coddled, untalented offspring of a powerful figure, and performs a truly wild balancing act in making her character simultaneously forceful, frail, idiotic, conniving, downright goofy, yet also icily menacing — a sociopathic chasm of endless need barely masked by inflated self-regard; helpless, yet able to turn without warning and remorselessly deliver bloody violence. Yes, the parallels to Orbán’s Hungary, to Erdoğan‘s Turkey, to Assad’s Syria, and indeed to Trump’s White House are inescapable: a high-rolling Winslet supporter, bearing a striking resemblance in appearance and speech to Trump’s lickspittle Sebastian Gorka, dons a tuxedo to quaff Champagne at a luxurious gala with other similarly-manicured grandees, and fulminates to his fellow jet-setters against the “neo-Marxists” who would “ruin the country” for such ordinary, humble people as themselves. I’ll not give away any of the plot, but suffice it to say, the hermetic seal around the administrative palace is quickly broken, both obviously by an event towards the end of the first episode, but also figuratively in the opening moments of the show. I don’t know where the rest of this series is headed — it’s only six episodes long — and I may change my assessment along the way, but for now … this seems timely, clever, pointed, and well-executed (no pun intended), and I look forward to seeing how it rolls out!

I imagine the pitch meeting for this abomination went something like this: “Mr. Zaslav, you know how HBO creates edgy, artistic, thought-provoking fare?” “Wha…? Huh?” [sounds of chewing and slurping as Zaslav devours whole roast game hens barely pausing to chew] “No, no, no! That’s the old HBO … buncha New York intellectual snobs … no, no, I’m trying to KILL all that!” “Well, good news sir! We’ve got JUST the vehicle to drive the next nail into its coffin!!” “HUH!?! Speak up, I can’t hear you over this home renovation show!” [audio blares from a bank of 12 monitors, each playing a variation on the same reality t.v. show] “I’ve got a show called _The Idol_ and it’s basically a sociopath’s rape fantasy, pounded out over a weekend by copy-pasting dozens of clichéd movie tropes, shot by a squirrel with a camera mounted to its back, and edited by flipping a coin … it’s got some of the superficial trappings of old HBO’s boundary-pushing style … but none of the pesky depth which might make people actually think.” “Hunhh, whaaa…? Ya gotta dumb it down for me son!” “Mr. Zaslav sir, I’ve got some meritless torture-and-rape porn to fill out the lineup!” “WHAAA- sounds GREAT! My kinda people LOVE porn and HATE women!! But … can we get away with this?” “Oh, yes, sir! We’ll claim it’s a satire … even though our show will be impossible to distinguish, in any way, from the abusive sort of wet-brained garbage we’ll claim it to be satirizing!” “Excellent, well done!” “And best of all, sir … the male lead can’t act his way out of a wet paper-“ “Yes, yes, you’ve told me enough,” [sound of retching as Zaslav induces vomiting to clear room for the next round of game hens] “Well done, Mr. Malone will be quite pleased. Also, you’re fired.” “But … but sir, why!??” “I’ve racked up billions in corporate debt we need to clear, but I also want to give myself another fat eight-figure raise, so all the little people gotta get laid off.” “Sir, this isn’t fair!” “Fair!?? It’s just economics! All the little people gotta take it … speaking of which,” [sound of belt unbuckling and pants dropping] “cue up your show!”

Simply wonderful. A landmark show. If you are too young to have watched this during its original 1990s run, do yourself a favor: DO NOT WATCH THE HD REMASTER!! SEEK OUT AND WATCH EARLIER DVD RELEASES, in SD, and preferably in the 4:3 aspect ratio. For whatever reason, the company behind the HD remaster cut corners, and the results reflect this: colors are often wrong and glaring; filters are lost, so scenes meant to take place at night are shown instead to take place in daylight; faces look plastic as a result of the “resolution upscaling;” special effects have sometimes not been recreated, so some scene actions now make little sense; by reframing scenes to 16:9 we’re shown lights and boom mics and camera assistants meant to stay offscreen … or alternately, to omit those extraneous C-stands and boom mics, the scenes are cropped after being reframed such that the tops of characters heads are now cropped out; in short, what you see in the HD remaster is not the show which gained a massive fandom, but a terrible butchering of that show. Avoid any remastered version which was released to DVD later than August of 2014. Alas, as of this writing (2023.05.20), the version of _Buffy_ available to stream online is, from season 4 onwards, also the terrible HD remaster. (Although, for whatever stroke of good fortune, seasons 1 through 3 are now streamed online in 4:3 SD.) So… …save up your money, and find a pre-2014 DVD box set to buy. You’ll thank yourself later!! Trust me, this show is not to be missed!

Just awful. Elizabeth Olsen is tremendously watchable, and Jesse Plemons and many secondary characters acquit themselves admirably. But otherwise this feels like an 82-minute-long Lifetime movie padded out to … is it eight episodes? … nine? … six? … who knows, but it feels like twelve hours of nothing. It feels cheap. Attention to period detail is inconsistent, with many interiors and Ms. Olsen’s wardrobe being generally passable, but extras’ and secondary characters’ wardrobes and set dressing for location and exterior shoots being either anodyne or outright anachronistic. It’s shot lazily, with strictly paint-by-numbers direction and cinematography. It often feels careless, like a made-for-t.v. cheapie cranked out to capitalize on a headline … which is odd, since the crime this lurid series exploits was committed fifty years ago. And it’s simply poorly-written. Characters spend pages rambling on about nothing. We are told, (rather than shown) many key points — which means opportunities for conflict and drama are often sidestepped in favor of lazy exposition, partly explaining why this series feels so drawn-out. Whole scenes illuminate nothing. Many details are introduced through dialogue for no good reason, and are then as quickly forgotten! Perhaps this is meant to stretch the runtime? Having trimmed Discovery’s debt by axing many of HBO’s premium but high-budget offerings, and thus facing gaps in their erstwhile crown jewel’s dwindling lineup, it’s conceivable the brass at newly-merged Warner Bros. Discovery found a cheap, shelved, 90-minute script, told famed budget-t.v. producer David E Kelley “This needs to be a 20-hour quickie, stat!” and months later _Love & Death_ was whelped … the flagship for new Bargain Basement HBO. Whatever the circumstances, this 30-hour series feels lazily-written, hastily-produced, and mechanically-edited … but worst of all, it feels leering. At one moment it condescends the characters, then it introduces an unmotivated maudlin scene … because, it seems, the soapy mood-arc demands it. But then we are nominally invited to empathize with a character. Yet minutes later we find the characters being mocked again. Whether through bad writing or bad editing, this tonal inconsistency whipsaws our perspective in a way that is alienating rather than artful. The actors do their best with the material, but the material is glib, surface-level opportunism. It would all be exasperating, if any one episode could even hold a viewer’s attention for long. And it all feels so … unnecessary! Why even is this series? Why?? What a waste of Elizabeth Olson’s innate magnetism and immense talent. What a waste of Jesse Plemons’ commited performance. What a waste of the many fine players around them. If this kind of cheap, derivative fluff is what we can expect from the David Zaslav era of HBO Max, then HBO is in deep trouble, and their recently-rebranded “Max” streaming service is as good as dead.

Frighteningly prescient, and tenfold more so in light of recent U.S. events. You foretold so clearly what none of us were willing to see on the horizon, Margaret Atwood. There’s still time for good people, working together, to shore up against this oncoming conservative tide … but we’d best act quickly: Rupert Murdoch is promoting fascism worldwide at such an alarming rate, this series could soon seem like a documentary.

The most chilling aspect of this series? It’s retelling actual events. The writers didn’t have to dream this up, they simply took one of MANY such series of circumstances surrounding police forces in the U.S.A. and they put it all up on screen. So if you live outside of the U.S.A., be advised: this series portrays how actual police in this country behave. But if you live in the U.S.A. (or in one of the many developing nations where civil society is fragile, democracy is weak or weakening, and—because laws have become secondary to nebulous “traditions”—so-called security forces behave like an illegitimate occupying force, making sure the lower castes “know their place” … then all of this series will seem terribly familiar to you. Rather than terrorizing through brute force while behaving as a law unto itself, a legitimate security force derives its power from the consent of the citizenry … and it’s beyond time we reasserted that control. If this series enrages you, then take action. Unite with other people and organize to make a difference in this world, because activism is what drives positive change.

Starring as Elizabeth Holmes, Amanda Seyfried nails an incredibly difficult role—that of a sociopath who is hugely multifaceted yet also incredibly shallow—and she does so with sympathy towards the character even as she fully inhabits that character’s amoral abandon. The series itself is one of the better ones … being eight episodes long it is not without the occasional hiccup, but the writing and direction here are both award-worthy, and imaginative touches lift it above plain docudrama—a 30th birthday party and its aftermath are especially surreal and nightmarishly apt. Naveen Andrews too deserves high praise, and award recognition, for the depth and tragic pathos he brings to the one other player equally complicit in Elizabeth Holmes’ schemes, a character who might otherwise have been played simply as a greedy schemer. And overall the series stands as an indictment of late-stage capitalism: it illustrates how the blame lies in a system which in the end would turn us all into monsters. But the most praise here goes to Ms. Seyfried for her tightrope-act of a performance, which she pulled off with aplomb while making it seem effortless. I don’t know whether Hulu series receive Emmy awards, but Ms. Seyfried absolutely deserves one.