Category: TV Features

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Better Call Saul, Season Six

Bob Odenkirk (above) shines as Saul Goodman.

At the end of Citizen Kane, the nameless reporter, who has pursued the mystery of Charles Foster Kane’s last word “Rosebud,” stands with his colleagues amid piles of the great man’s possessions and admits he hasn’t been able to figure out what it meant. “What have you been doing all this time?” they ask.

“Playing with a jigsaw puzzle.”

The sixth and final season of Better Call Saul begins with homage to that famous ending, only instead of executors taking inventory of a mogul’s estate, it’s the government seizing the property of fugitive lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk). Like Breaking Bad, the show it serves as a prequel to, it’s the story of how a fairly normal guy becomes an epic villain. Only in the case of Better Call Saul, we’ve always known where this is going. It’s like Titanic — we know the ship is going to sink; it’s all about the details of how it happened.

When the season begins, Jimmy McGill is more successful than ever, but he’s already in over his head farther than he knows. His new solo criminal practice under the name Saul Goodman is thriving, and he’s flush with cash thanks to his star client, Mexican drug cartel kingpin Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton). He’s blissfully unaware of carnage unfolding south of the border, where Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) has ordered a hit on Lalo in his own home — a big no-no in the cartel world. His man on the inside, Nacho (Michael Mando), did his job by unlocking the gate for the gunmen. It’s not his fault that they killed everyone in the house but Lalo, including burning to death the Salamanca family’s beloved grandmother, but he’s the one who’s left without a chair when the music stops.

Meanwhile, back in Albuquerque, Saul and his power-lawyer wife Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) are pursuing an elaborate scheme to win a long-running lawsuit by framing their former boss Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) for cocaine possession. Their machinations generate some much-needed comedy in the persons of Betsy and Craig Kellerman, former clients whose transparent viciousness makes them easy marks.

Then, showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould deliver one of their patented rug-pulls. When the Kellermans get wise to the scheme, Saul wants to simply bribe them into silence, but Kim’s solution is so vicious and cold-blooded, it actually shocks Saul. Kim is Better Call Saul’s richest character, and biggest surprise. The woman we met as a try-hard do-gooder, whose attraction to the bad-boy screwup is a mystery to everyone, has emerged as the show’s Lady Macbeth. Of all of the show’s drug lords, street bosses, criminal lawyers, and lawyers who are criminals, she is the most dangerous because no one knows what she wants. Her quest to ruin Howard is unnecessary, and her methods — as fun as they are to watch — are excessive and dangerous. Surely, an operator as shrewd as she understands the risks, so what does she see that we don’t?

The most ironic aspect of this story that revels in earned irony is that the only displays of virtue come from the most hardened, violent criminals. Nacho’s operatic demise in episode 3, “Rock and Hard Place,” grows from his desire to protect his father from the consequences of his life of crime. It’s Fring’s enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut’s (Jonathan Banks) principled stand against civilian casualties that ultimately saves his boss’ bacon when Don Hector (Mark Margolis) starts asking uncomfortable questions about who tried to whack Lalo.

Artistically, Better Call Saul has no rivals on television. The show routinely pulls off bravado shots few would dare attempt, and the writing team is at the top of its game. Since it’s the last season, the executives at AMC seem to have given them carte blanche to do all the crazy stuff that enters their heads.

For all that, Better Call Saul’s artistry is not indulgent. It’s disciplined, visually inventive, emotionally affecting, character-driven filmmaking of the highest order. The most mundane detail, like Kim’s discarded wine-stopper, can become the setup for an emotional punch line. Even the most outlandish moments feel real.

And wither Saul Goodman? Will we end the series understanding how he broke so bad? The opening Citizen Kane reference suggests that the exercise is ultimately futile. The boat sinks, and we may never truly understand why.

Better Call Saul is streaming on AMC+.

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Foundation

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is one of the most influential works of literature ever created. In the early 1940s, Asimov was a struggling science-fiction writer working a day job at the Philadelphia Naval Yard when he read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. During a meeting with Astounding Science Fiction magazine editor John W. Campbell, he brainstormed an idea: If you were in Imperial Rome with an Enlightenment attitude and foreknowledge of what was coming, would you be able to prevent the Dark Ages that followed?

Foundation’s protagonist is Hari Seldon, a mathematician living on Trantor, the capitol planet of an empire that spans the entire galaxy. He creates a new scientific discipline called “psychohistory,” which he claims can predict the future. Just as physics can predict with great accuracy what will happen if you heat or compress a pool of water but cannot predict what each individual water molecule will do, psychohistory combines psychology and statistics to predict the fate of masses of people, without necessarily predicting each individual’s future.

Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) and Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) are academics, exiled to an inhospitable planet for defying the galaxy in an attempt to preserve it.

Seldon discovers that the 12,000-year-old empire is about to collapse, and if nothing is done, a 30,000-year dark age of war and ignorance will descend on the far-flung children of humanity. The collapse is inevitable, but he devises a plan to limit the dark ages to only 1,000 years by gathering together some of the sharpest minds in the empire to create an Encyclopedia Galactica. The preserved knowledge will provide future humans with a foundation from which they can build a new, better civilization.

Leaders of empires hate to be told they’re on their way out, of course, so Seldon and a band of loyal followers are exiled to Terminus, an inhospitable ice-ball on the outer rim of the galaxy. Turns out, establishing a base far away from the center of the collapsing empire is all part of Seldon’s plan. For the next millennia, Seldon’s secret Foundation lurks in the shadows of galactic history, subtly influencing events and providing hope to humanity.

Asimov’s premise resonated with the American elites who flooded colleges in the 1950s. America was an empire now, but unlike Rome, we had the advantage of hindsight. Things would be different this time. But the books were translated into numerous languages and inspired more than just our own imperial hubris. One person who read Asimov at an impressionable age was Osama bin Laden; in Arabic, “The Foundation” translates to “Al-Qaeda.”

Traces of Foundation can be found in all the science fiction that came after, including Dune and Star Wars, both of which feature secret conspiracies against sprawling galactic empires. But adapting the stories for the screen has long been thought impossible — Nobel economist Paul Krugman, who credits Foundation for inspiring his career, called the books “aggressively un-cinematic.” Yet producer David S. Goyer, who wrote Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, convinced Apple to back a major series for their new streaming service. From the opening credits, it’s obvious Goyer sold it as “Game of Thrones in space.”

Seldon is played by Jared Harris, a veteran of Mad Men and another series described as GOT in space, The Expanse. The arrival on Trantor of Seldon’s protege Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), a math genius from a backwater planet who is the only other person in the galaxy able to fully grasp psychohistory, sets events in motion. She and Seldon are arrested for treason by the ruling triumvirate, who are three clones of the long-dead Emperor Cleon. As they’re on trial, a terrorist attack collapses Trantor’s main space elevator, killing millions. The leading suspects in the attack are agents from the feuding planets, Anacreon and Thespis. Unable to determine which planet is responsible, the emperors simply attack both, precipitating a crisis that will ultimately bring down the Empire.

Like the galactic empire, Apple has effectively limitless resources, and the money is on the screen from the beginning. From the vistas of the city-world Trantor to the drowned planet of Synnax, the special effects and production design in the first two episodes are absolutely impeccable. Goyer’s scripts are at their strongest during Seldon’s trial, when Harris is able to project gravitas as he speaks truth to power. But it’s already evident from the turgid dialogue that the heady nature of the story is going to be a major problem going forward. The producers seem to recognize the problem of losing the human elements to the sweep of psychohistory, but not how to fix it. Llobell and her erstwhile lover Raych (Alfred Enoch) don’t have enough romantic chemistry to fill a science experiment. While it’s still early in a long story, it’s not clear if a new TV empire can be built on this Foundation.

Foundation is streaming on Apple TV+.

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Ken Burns Takes On Muhammad Ali

A documentary is always judged first by its subject. People will love a slapdash doc about a subject they’re interested in more than a skillfully put together documentary about a boring or obscure subject. Judging from the sheer number of documentaries made about him in the last 50 years or so, no one is more interesting than Muhammad Ali. 

I’m not a sports fan, but one of my all time favorite documentaries is When We Were Kings, the 1996 Best Documentary Oscar winner about the 1974 fight between Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. But that’s the tip of the Ali iceberg. Just last year, documenter Antoine Fuqua dropped What’s My Name? Muhammad Ali. 

Now, Ken Burns, a contender to the title of The Greatest when it comes to documentaries (television, anyway) takes his swing with a four-part, eight-hour PBS miniseries called simply Muhammad Ali. It is predictably Burnsian, with all of the strengths that implies, but fewer of the weaknesses. 

Burns’ strengths are access, thoroughness, and clarity. The man literally has his own nonprofit foundation dedicated solely to financing his docs, so money to license archival footage is not an issue. After burnishing his reputation for decades as the filmmaker of record for American history, no one is going to say no to talking to him on camera. And Burns’ completely transparent filmmaking, a descendant of the high BBC style seen in epic documents like The World at War, only looks easy because it’s designed to be digestible. It is in fact extraordinarily difficult to pull off, but time and again, Burns does it with low-key panache. 

His signature move of isolating details on still photos and then slowly pulling out to reveal the entire image is deployed to great effect — the key is to find the most interesting face in the picture, and start there. Nine times out of 10, that’s Ali. Inspired by wrester Gorgeous George, he bragged about how beautiful he was, and he was right. Young Ali was startlingly good looking, in better shape than just about anyone on the planet, and dripping with charisma. During his gold medal-winning stint at the 1960 Olympics, a journalist described him as “the Mayor of Olympic Village.” 

Coverage just doesn’t get more thorough than devoting eight hours of prime time television to your subject. Ali was one of the most photographed and filmed people in history, so there’s plenty of material to work with. One of Burns’ best decisions is to let the fights play out much longer than a two-hour doc would allow. From the first time he fought as a teenager, Ali said he would become the greatest boxer of all time, and the proof is in this fight footage. Especially during the second episode, (also entitled “What’s My Name?”) Ali looks superhuman in the ring. Burns sets up the easy cynicism of the boxing press and announcers, only to knock it down when he lets you hear the awe slip into their voices while they watch Ali methodically take apart opponents who were supposed to beat him. 

The length allows Burns to avoid pure hagiography by diving deep into subjects like Ali’s involvement with the Nation of Islam. In what was the most shocking moment of the entire doc for me, personally, Ali praises segregationist governor George Wallace, and says he thinks Black people and white people shouldn’t mix. Burns presents the moment in an extended clip, so there’s no doubt that the director wasn’t taking his subject out of context. Ali meant what he said at that moment, but Burns also shows Ali’s moral evolution and growth as the barely educated Louisville kid sees more of the world and his understanding deepens. 

His rhetorical style of trash talking would go on to inspire everyone from Michael Jordan to Donald Trump — which means he was also responsible for bringing a lot of negativity into the world, as people without his smarts and talent tried to emulate him. Trolls today wish they had Ali’s insight into what will get a rise out of his opponents. 

Burns’ weakness is that he’s long-winded to the point of being boring. But here he is saved by his endlessly fascinating subject. Ali was many things, but he was never boring. And that makes Muhammad Ali essential viewing. 

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The Taika Trifecta

What We Do in the Shadows

If you want to watch some great half-hour comedy, follow the tracks of executive producer Taika Waititi. If you’re a Marvel True Believer, you know the New Zealander as the director of Thor: Ragnarok, as well as the guy under the motion capture for Korg, Thor’s alien drinking buddy. But as an executive producer, he’s been quietly amassing a Norman Lear-sized string of great television.

Waititi got his start in TV as part of the team that made Flight of the Conchords, a standout of the ’00s comedy boomlet. The musical world, where characters can go off into a visual flight of fancy while singing a song, has subtly influenced everything he’s done since. So has the humor, which invites the audience to laugh at its characters’ absurdities and vanity, but never puts anyone down.

In 2014, Waititi teamed up with Conchords Jemaine Clement to write, direct, and co-star in What We Do in the Shadows. The film took the mockumentary framework of Man Bites Dog and The Office and applied it to a dysfunctional group of vampires living as flatmates in Wellington. The film gleefully skewered horror tropes, and like Conchords, was elevated by great characters and keen observation which finds the humor in everyday conflicts and setbacks.

<i>Wellington Paranormal</i>

In 2018, Waititi and Clement drummed up a television spin-off for Shadows that went in an unexpected direction. Instead of following the vampires, they focused on the two police officers who kept getting called to investigate disturbances in the vampires’ home. It turns out that the vamps aren’t the only weird things Officers Minogue (Mike Minogue) and O’Leary (Karen O’Leary) see on a daily basis. Wellington Paranormal deftly mixes Cops and The X-Files. Sgt. Maaka (Maaka Pohatu) serves as a low-rent version of A.D. Skinner, sending the Mulder and Scully figures out to investigate supernatural phenomena like a haunted Nissan 300ZX, alien body-snatcher replicator pod farms, and the constant menace of zombie outbreak.

Wellington Paranormal was a hit in New Zealand and was only recently released in the U.S., but its success spawned a full-fledged Shadows TV adaptation, transported from New Zealand to Staten Island. Waititi helped launch the show’s first season, directing three episodes including the pilot and “The Trial,” an instant classic where the ensemble cast of Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin (Mark Proksch) are judged unworthy by a council of vampires consisting of high-powered cameos from actors like Tilda Swinton and Wesley Snipes. Waititi stepped away from the show after the first season, but it has only gotten better. Now in its third season, it has fleshed out the character of Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), added the great Kristen Schaal as a series regular, and finally acquired the budget to match its story ambitions.

<i>Reservation Dogs</I>

Waititi’s latest TV venture is also set in the United States, but not in a place that usually inspires comedies. Reservation Dogs follows four teenage friends growing up on a Native-American reservation in Oklahoma. Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) is the reluctant leader of the group, who starts off the pilot episode by stealing a potato chip delivery truck and selling it to a chop shop run by meth heads. Elora (Devery Jacobs), Cheese (Lane Factor), and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) are saving the ill-gotten gains from their petty crimes to leave the reservation for the promised land of California. The series was developed with Sterlin Harjo, a longtime indie filmmaker who mined his childhood as a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma for stories and settings. It’s definitely a comedy but not a laugh-out-loud kinda show — the second episode revolves around the difficulty of accessing healthcare on the reservation, for example. As Bear and his buds get into low-stakes scrapes, which feel very high-stakes to them, the ensemble expands as they encounter one memorable character after another. Harjo’s voice is dominant, but you can see Waititi’s influences in the magical realist touches, such as the spirit of a less-than-heroic warrior ancestor who haunts Bear, dispensing advice of dubious value.

The show is shaping up to be the best example of the humane, inclusive humor, which is Waititi’s much-needed contribution to our shell-shocked culture.

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Loki Enters The Marvel Multiverse

Tom Hiddleston as Loki

Every culture needs a god of mischief. For many Native Americans, it was Coyote. In West Africa, it was Anansi. For the Norse, it was Loki. 

Most trickster gods have no motivation beyond spreading chaos. They are, as they say on the internet, in it for the lulz. Loki was a little different. He had an agenda. To prevent him from seizing power, the gods of Valhalla imprisoned him — order symbolically controlling chaos. But one day, he will escape his bounds, and bring about ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, and the destruction of creation. Chaos, in other words, will ultimately win. 

When Stan Lee introduced a superhero based on the Norse god Thor, making a version of Loki to be his arch-enemy was a no-brainer. Played by Tom Hiddleston in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is the version most people know. And now, to feed the gaping maw of streaming content of Disney+, Loki the villain has his own series. 

Loki begins, as all things must, with Avengers: Endgame. During the hopelessly convoluted time travel plot/MCU clip show the Avengers concocted to reverse Thanos’ snap heard ‘round the universe, they traveled back to the events of the first Avengers film, where a chaotic mix-up briefly left Loki in possession of the MacGuffin de jour, the cosmically powerful Tesseract. But when he tries to teleport away from the fracas to use his new magical artifact to take over Asgard, he finds himself instead in the clutches of a mysteriously powerful organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Instead of producing plentiful, cheap, low-carbon power from nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar, like the TVA we all know and tolerate should be doing, this TVA is tasked with keeping the multiverse simple and understandable by stamping out variations from the One Sacred Timeline. Putting a powerful magic item in the hands of a trickster god certainly qualifies as a disruptive event. 

Loki is used to throwing his magical weight around, but the TVA’s privileged place in the multiverse means it makes its own rules. Magic doesn’t work, but time travel sure does, and they weaponize it to neutralize Loki. Existing outside of time, they’ve seen it all before, and will see it all again. 

In the pilot, much is made of the TVA’s ’70s retro aesthetic. Instead of charismatic gods and heroes, they’re a bunch of bureaucrats doing a job. When Loki appears before Judge Ravona Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), she is on the road to sentencing him to whatever the multiverse equivalent of the death penalty is until Special Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) intervenes. He’s hunting a powerful variant force threatening to tear the multiverse a new charged vacuum emboitment, and it takes a trickster to catch a trickster. 

Hiddleston’s Loki has always been one of the best actors in the MCU, providing a little lightness to Thor’s ponderous proceedings, until Taika Waititi let Chris Hemsworth’s comic hair down in Raganarok. Under the direction of Kate Heron, he is predictably charismatic. Wilson unexpectedly turns out to be a great deadpan foil to Hiddleston, and the pair’s chemistry promises to propel Loki to series length. 

Written by Rick and Morty alum Michael Waldron, Loki looks to take the MCU squarely into Doctor Who territory of multidimensional madness. If the team can sustain the energy of the pilot, it might be a time trip worth taking. 

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Bo Burnham: Inside

“I hope this email finds you well.” How many missives started like that in 2020? It was ostensibly expressing a wish that you were not infected with COVID, but it was also about mental health. Whether you were hiding from the virus in quarantine or dodging the maskless in your “essential” job, odds are pretty good you were not well — at least not emotionally. In January, 2020, the US Census reported 11 percent of people surveyed were experiencing depression or anxiety. By December, that number had risen to a whopping 42 percent. 

Among those who were not OK was Bo Burnham. The comedian, musician, and director started out as one of the first teenage YouTube stars before graduating to standup, but he quit performing live after experiencing onstage panic attacks. His retirement from live performance may have been the best thing to happen to him, as he expanded his writing and directing. His 2018 film Eighth Grade is a masterpiece of adolescent comedy; I put it at number 16 in my best of the decade list.

Burnham spent the pandemic locked down in Los Angeles; to pass the time, he decided to film a comedy special, his first in four years. Inside is the product of a one-man band: Burham wrote 20 songs, designed the lighting, ran the cameras, recorded the audio, and did everything else. With the exception of the end, it’s filmed entirely inside a tiny studio apartment. In a sense, it’s him getting back to his YouTube roots, but with much more expensive equipment. 

The 1918 influenza pandemic was a turning point in world history. It hastened the end of World War I, when 900,000 German soldiers came down the flu in a matter of months. But aside from Edvard Munch’s Self Portrait With the Spanish Flu, it produced very little in terms of lasting art. Even Ernest Hemingway’s novels set during the war omit mention of the pandemic that killed at least ten million more people than the conflict. That implies to me that people just wanted to forget about it.

COVID might end up being similarly forgotten by art. But at least we’ll have Inside. And frankly, I can’t think of any better way to record what what it felt like to live through 2020 than what Burnham has accomplished. Some of the songs come across as Tom Lehrer gone synth pop, or maybe something Weird Al would do if he wasn’t parodying other people’s songs. In other words, they’re catchy and funny, like the soon-to-be-immortal ditty “Welcome To The Internet”: “What would you prefer?/ Would you like to fight for civil rights/or tweet a racial slur?/Be Happy/Be horny/Be bursting with rage/We got a million different ways to engage.” 

Like all great comedians, there’s more than just a lust for yuks at work here. Burnham’s lyrics are cutting, but they’re also insightful. He has an internet star’s confessional streak, and by the halfway mark of filming his show more or less in chronological order, his defenses are crumbling. Burnham turned 30 during lockdown, and spends the last minute of his twenties inviting us to join him as he stares bleakly at the clock, waiting for 11:59 PM to change to 12:00 AM. When he tries to record a bit about working on this special for a full year, he falls apart completely, storming off his own set. 

You, like the artists of the Lost Generation, might just want to forget the whole thing (which is still ongoing, by the way) ever happened, but this show is not about wallowing in past pain. Inside is the first time I’ve really felt any kind of catharsis about the annus horribilis. 

Bo Burnham: Inside is streaming on Netflix

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Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. Makes Use of Supervillain Absurdity

Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing — M.O.D.O.K. (voiced by Patton Oswalt) makes use of Marvel’s Silver Age-era silliness.

Supervillains — they’re just like us! They’re insecure. They struggle with work-life balance. Their kids are a handful. They can focus their thoughts into deadly energy beams.

Okay, the last part probably doesn’t apply to you (and if it does, please don’t call me), but it does apply to M.O.D.O.K. Marvel Comics has been creating and assimilating heroes and villains since 1939, and M.O.D.O.K. is … certainly one of them. You can be excused if you’ve never heard of him. He was created in 1967, the period known as Marvel’s Silver Age, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as a foil for Captain America. George Tarleton, a technician at shady tech company Advanced Idea Mechanics, was injected with mutagens designed to increase his mental capacity, transforming him into the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing. The drugs grew his cranium and shrank his body, so he is forced to live in an armored hover-chair of his own design. He immediately used his superior intellect to take over A.I.M. and launch various schemes for world conquest, which must be thwarted by whatever Marvel superhero is in need of a punching bag at the moment.

While it produced some of the most eye-popping art comics have ever seen, Marvel’s Silver Age is so called because it wasn’t a Golden Age. To call M.O.D.O.K. a C-list character is being generous. He kind of made sense in the psychedelic ’60s when drawn by super-genius artist Jack Kirby, but he never really got past his innate ridiculousness. On nerd culture website IGN’s list of the “100 Greatest Villains of All Time,” M.O.D.O.K. was No. 100. At least he made the list! But it’s like he built this army of atomic super-soldiers for nothing.

In other words, M.O.D.O.K. is perfect for comedy, and in this dark age where no Marvel IP can long go unexploited, Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum have given him the perfect vehicle: a sitcom. It’s not the first time the Marvel juggernaut has crushed the hoariest of TV genres; WandaVision married the blockbuster and I Love Lucy to fine results. But M.O.D.O.K. on Hulu gives the Silver Age the slapstick treatment it deserves, thanks largely to Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, the stop motion animation house behind Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken. Seth Green’s evergreen comedy was created to put his action figure collection into surreal and hilarious situations. It has evolved into a weekly visual tour de force that pushes the limits of the oldest animated form. M.O.D.O.K. takes these skills to the next level, incorporating motion capture performances and even the occasional live action shot into the mix.

Oswalt stars as our floating head antihero, and the comedian takes to it like he was born to play the part. M.O.D.O.K.’s bulging intellect is overshadowed by his Trumpian vanity. When yet another extremely expensive battle with the Avengers ends in failure, he learns A.I.M. is broke. After a night of clubbing and flattery by tech CEO Austin Van Der Sleet (Beck Bennett), he agrees to sell the company to tech giant GRUMBL. Playing second fiddle inside the organization he conquered with his mind doesn’t sit well with the most self-involved brain in the multiverse — especially when they replace his torture chamber with a day care center. As the season progresses, his schemes to regain control lead to escalating super-science conflict with his work frenemy Monica (Wendi McLendon-Covey). He steadily loses status until he’s only head of the mail room.

Meanwhile, at home, M.O.D.O.K.’s wife Jodie (Aimee Garcia) is a mommy blogger whose new book Jodify Your Life is climbing the bestseller charts. M.O.D.O.K.’s jealousy tears the family apart leaving daughter Melissa (Melissa Fumero) and son Lou (Ben Schwartz) stuck in the middle.

Making comedy out of burdening comic book characters with real-life emotions and failings isn’t a new concept. The stamp of The Venture Bros. can be seen frequently in the dysfunctional families of obsessed heroes and villains, such as when M.O.D.O.K. is thrown out of the hip villains-only nightclub, The Soho Lair. The writing is archly funny, delivering a couple of authentic laugh-out-loud moments in every 22-minute episode. It also helps that Oswalt’s reputation brings in a slew of high-powered guest voices, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Nathan Fillion, Jon Hamm, Chris Parnell, Alan Tudyk, and Bill Hader. The biggest attraction is the stunning animation. If you’ve been sleeping on films like the magnificent Kubo and the Two Strings, you’ll be shocked at how stop motion has progressed in the digital age. If everything has to be Marvel, I ask for more like this, please.

Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. is streaming on Hulu.

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The Savagery of Man: Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad

Mbedu and Aaron Pierre in The Underground Railroad

Perhaps Barry Jenkins’ biggest claim to fame is as a party to an accident. At the climax of the 2017 Academy Awards, presenters Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope and mistakenly announced La La Land as the winner of Best Picture. In fact, the winner was Jenkins’ film Moonlight.

It was the right choice. La La Land is an entertaining piece of craftsmanship, but Moonlight is legitimately one of the best films of the 21st century. Jenkins has the rare combination of complete technical mastery and a deeply empathetic mind. In other words, he can not only frame a good shot, he knows how to get the best from actors, too. Both skills are included in the “director” job description, but you’d be surprised how many well-paid people lack chops in one category — or both.

Jenkins, a native of Florida, cut his teeth in the low-budget indie world, and his projects until now have been as modestly scaled as they are brilliantly executed. Even his historical drama, the 2018 adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, which earned Regina King a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, remained focused on the story of two star-crossed lovers. With his new limited series for Amazon, The Underground Railroad, Jenkins’ vision was given the opportunity to expand to epic size. The director is more than up for the challenge.

The Underground Railroad is based on a novel by Colson Whitehead, which has been confounding genres and expectations since it was published in 2016. It’s a rare bird that won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. In Whitehead’s alternate American South of the 1850s, the Underground Railroad is not a secret network of safe houses and smuggling routes set up by Abolitionists and free Blacks to transport slaves to the free states of the North, and eventually Canada, but instead an actual railroad that runs underground. That detail, in which the metaphorical is made real, is key. This story is not about the historical reality of Antebellum America, but the psychological reality of Black experience in America.

Thuso Mbedu as Cora

Cora (Thuso Mbedu) is a slave on a plantation in Georgia. Her mother disappeared from the plantation years ago, when Cora was a child, and is assumed by local slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) to be the rare Black person who actually escaped the clutches of the Southern racial caste system. In the harrowing opening episode, we see the price of a failed escape, as Big Anthony (Elijah Everett) is tortured to death for the amusement of his masters’ garden party. The image of the plantation owners dancing a minuet while burning a man to death might seem over-the-top if the florid cruelty of Jim Crow lynchings wasn’t so exhaustively documented.

Cora is convinced to flee with her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre), and they plunge into a series of adventures all over the South as they flee the relentless Ridgeway. Jenkins is cinema’s foremost romantic — his stories have always revolved around the core of a beautiful love story — but the relationship between Cora and Caesar takes a back seat to the creation of spiraling tension and otherworldly images. It’s never clear where Cora’s dreams and visions end and the “real world” begin. She flashes back to memories of fear and mistreatment on the farm, and her trauma manifests in unexpected ways.

But Cora’s not the only one living in a dream world. The racial apartheid system ties everyone into cognitive knots. Cora’s first stop is a utopian community in South Carolina, where progressive white benefactors are running a research program “for the potential betterment of Negro lives.” That facade soon falls apart. Alternate North Carolina, where Black people have been completely exterminated and outlawed, operates like Nazi Germany during the Final Solution, right down to an Anne Frank figure hiding in an attic. Both racists and abolitionists believe they are doing what the Bible tells them to do. Most chilling of all is Ridgeway’s sidekick Homer (Chase Dillon), a 10-year-old Black boy who is a fearsome, emotionless slave catcher.

Jenkins is one of the most talented composers of images working today. Every few minutes, he throws out a shot that would be a career high for lesser talents. His color sense is simply unmatched. The visual fireworks are coupled with striking, subtle performances from Mbedu and Pierre — and, really, everyone on the screen. The Underground Railroad joins the ranks of Twin Peaks: The Return and Watchmen as the pinnacle of what ambitious, artful television can achieve. It’s also a warning of, as one “station agent” observes, “The savagery Man is capable of when he believe his cause to be just.”

The Underground Railroad is streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Film/TV TV Features

Disposable Soldiers Watch Democracy Crumble in Star Wars: The Bad Batch

The Star Wars prequels have been getting something of a re-evaluation lately. Maybe it’s a case of first-wave Millennial nostalgia, as the grown-up children of the ’90s reconnect with the media they remember, like the Boomers watching Happy Days. There is certainly that element, but I think the prequels are aging well because George Lucas’ overarching story of the fall of the Old Republic looks increasingly prescient.

The latest Disney+ animated series, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, begins as the prequel trilogy is reaching its climax. Like its live-action cousin The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch spins stories outside of the suffocating shadow of the Skywalker family melodrama. World-building has always been the franchise’s strong suit, so there are plenty of implied side stories in the galaxy far, far away to mine for material.

To me, one of the most profound questions the universe poses is raised in one of its filmic low points. Attack of the Clones is emblematic of the prequels, in both its strengths and weaknesses. The visuals are ahead of their time — no one else in the special effects game could touch turn-of-the-century Industrial Light & Magic, and Lucas retained his sharp eye for design until he retired. But he also seemingly forgot how to delegate, and he badly needed a writer. But success is an insidious poison, and so we got one of the worst on-screen romances ever, and a jumbled presentation of what is actually a compelling story of politics and manipulation. In the early days of the War on Terror, the story was a reminder of the dangers of an out-of-control security state.

Omega (above), voiced by Michelle Ang, is a deviant clone in Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Bad Batch, a spin-off of the Clone Wars series.

Senator Palpatine, who is secretly the evil space wizard Darth Sidious, engineers a separatist threat to the Galactic Republic and uses the crisis to have himself declared chancellor, and as an excuse to build an army of clones. As the Clone Wars grind on, Palpatine grooms his vainglorious apprentice Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, then orders his clone armies to ambush and kill their Jedi commanders.

That moment — known as “Order 66” — is the heart-rending climax of Revenge of the Sith; Obi Wan and Anakin’s fateful lightsaber duel pales in comparison. The clones, bred for the sole purpose of combat and forced by implanted chips to betray their comrades, become tragic figures in The Clone Wars animated series, which was finally given the ending it deserved by Disney+ last year. The Bad Batch is a group of elite clone commandos introduced in the final season. They are defective units rescued from disposal by Kamino’s clone master Nala Se (Gwendoline Yeo) for experimental upgrades. Their names are their purpose: Hunter, Wrecker, Tech, Crosshair, and Echo are all voiced by Dee Bradley Baker. The Bad Batch’s defects are their strengths, and when Order 66 comes in as they are backing Jedi master Depa Billaba (Archie Panjabi), they find that their controlling chips don’t work. Hunter, experiencing his first taste of free will in the midst of a galaxy-wide political upheaval, secretly lets Depa’s padawan escape.

The Order 66 sequence in the 70-minute pilot episode takes on unexpected relevance in the wake of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. As the assembled clones on Kamino listen to Palpatine announce the creation of the Empire, the Bad Batch realize it’s wrong but don’t quite know what to do about it. When Admiral Tarkin (Stephen Stanton, doing an uncanny Peter Cushing imitation) arrives to take command of the clones, he orders the commandos on a mission to mop up a group of separatist insurgents. When you’re a clone, nothing stops the Forever War. As they leave, a deviant female clone named Omega (Michelle Ang) begs them to take her. But the Separatists turn out to be a group of refugees from the Republic led by Saw Gerrera (Andrew Kishino), and the Bad Batch decide to desert, but not before returning to Kamino to retrieve Omega.

Led by Clone Wars and The Mandalorian writer/producer Dave Filoni, The Bad Batch expertly zeroes in on the questions of free will raised by the creation of semi-disposable, sentient clones. But more than an A.I. cautionary tale, the show’s themes could not be more relevant, such as, how much loyalty does an oppressed class owe a flawed democracy? The second episode reverts to a more conventional sci-fi escape story, but the background of a society losing its freedom and self-determination serves as a stark warning in these perilous times.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch is streaming on Disney+.

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Film/TV TV Features

Sasquatch Mixes Hell’s Angels and a Killer Bigfoot Story

David Holtman tracking down leads in Sasquatch (Photo courtesy Hulu)

Late in the new Hulu documentary miniseries Sasquatch, anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum puts the cryptid in the context of “wild man in the woods” legends that go back to Gilgamesh. As long as we can remember, there have been humanoid manifestations of our fears of the unknown, and the unknowable hostility of nature, haunting the edges of our vision. 

Sasquatch begins with freelance journalist David Holthouse trying to track down the truth behind a cryptic memory. In October, 1993, Holthouse was a wasted youth working on an illegal pot farm in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle. One night, as the crew was packing it in, he overheard another worker telling his boss that he had seen three bodies in a pot field that had been torn apart by a Bigfoot. The guy was so agitated that Holthouse thought he was absolutely sincere in describing what he believed he had seen. After a career of infiltrating white supremacist cells and investigating Mafia murders, Holthouse decided to return to Humbolt County to see if there was any truth to the memory. 

As it turns out, Humbolt County is prime Sasquatch territory. The most famous footage of a Bigfoot, the infamous Patterson-Gimlin film, was captured there in 1967. Holthouse interviews Bob Gimlin, who assures him that Bigfoot is a peaceful creature. Then he interviews the guy who claims to have hoaxed Gimlin by dressing up in a homemade Bigfoot costume, even producing the costume itself. 

To me, that feels like the biggest scoop in Sasquatch, but Holthouse and director Joshua Rofé have a much bigger story to tell. Humbolt County in the early 1990s was the focus of the Reaganite War on Drugs, and let’s just say there were a lot more likely ways to get killed than by Bigfoot. The Hell’s Angels, for example, controlled the choicest plot of land in what a veteran grower named Ghostdance calls the best climate for growing cannabis in the world. The rural area made famous by back-to-the-land hippies fleeing the harsh vibes of the Bay Area had, by then, descended into an insular, paranoid, and heavily armed community where growers and the California Highway Patrol played high-stakes cat-and-mouse games. 

Rofé puts Holthouse, the investigator, in the center of his story, which normally annoys me. In this case, though, I will have to grudgingly admit that it works. Holthouse has a particular kind of anti-charisma. He says that, for some reason, the criminals and “monsters” he has written about in his career have opened up to him, because they think he’s as crooked as they are. The process of investigating the mystery, in which Holthouse has numerous late-night phone calls and clandestine meetings in the parking lot of a Humbolt sports bar, takes up the bulk of the three episodes. That’s probably inevitable, because Holthouse has very little to go on. He doesn’t even have a body, nor did he ever see a body. None of the murders in the Emerald Triangle he can confirm happened match the facts of his memory. Holthouse is mostly chasing dead ends — right up until he suddenly isn’t. 

Sasquatch definitely suffers from the dreaded Streaming Docuseries Bloat Syndrome (SDBS), but the two-pronged dive into weirdo cryptid obsessives and the California criminal underworld is creepier than your usual true crime eyebrow-raiser. If nothing else, it proves that the nuts and bolts of journalism can make for compelling TV.