Category: TV Features

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Good Omens

David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale in Good Omens.

If there’s one specific genre trick the British seem to do a lot better than Americans, or any other English-speaking writers, it’s combining comedy and sci fi/fantasy. The quintessential example is Douglas Adams. He was a writer and story editor (what we would now call “showrunner”) for Doctor Who in the late 1970s whose speciality was punching up scripts where the Time Lord slyly acknowledged how silly it was to be saving the world from stuntmen in rubber suits. He originally pitched The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy as a BBC radio play, and it metastasized into a bestselling book and hit TV series, before becoming, after a long delay, a mediocre-at-best film in 2005.

Neil Gaiman was Adam’s biographer before becoming a one-man publishing juggernaut with the seminal Sandman comics series and a run of novels such as American Gods. Early in his career, Gaiman had the incredible good fortune of co-writing a novel with Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld novels were the underground darling of the fantasy community. Pratchett’s work has plenty of social commentary, and they’re dripping with British wit, but they’re not, strictly speaking, satire, because he was able to make you care deeply about his comic characters, even as they fell down and humiliated themselves in baroque manners.

The novel they wrote together was Good Omens, and it’s been a classic for two decades. Pratchett died in 2005, and since Gaiman had good fortune converting American Gods to TV (at least one season of it), Amazon and Aunty Beeb teamed up to create a big-budget adaptation.

Remember that Looney Tunes cartoon where the sheep dog and the wolf are friends until they clock in to their respective, adversarial jobs? That’s pretty much the relationship of the two co-protagonists of Good Omens. Crowley (David Tennant) is a demon from hell who took the form of a snake and tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) is the angel who was given a flaming sword and tasked with keeping the fallen humans out of the Garden. They’re minor characters in a famous, sweeping story — in this case, the traditional Judeo-Christian narrative of creation and revelation or at least the Anglican/Catholic version. Like Rozencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s play, they take a jaundiced view of their role in the sweep of cosmic history. After being on Earth for a few thousand years, they come to like the humans they’re tasked with helping and/or tempting. And more importantly, they like the finer things in life the humans have invented. Since their respective home offices don’t really care too much about the details of what happens on Earth, occasionally they fill in for each other when one of them, say, wants to see this excellent new play called Hamlet that is currently playing at the Globe Theatre in London.

They’ve got a pretty good scam going on until it hits a snag. Crowley is tasked with delivering the baby antichrist to his prospective parents, an American diplomat who will be well positioned to help kick off Armageddeon. Unfortunately, there’s a mixup at the Satanic convent masquerading as a hospital where the baby switch is to take place, and the son of Satan goes home with the wrong set of parents—an average English couple who make the Dursleys from Harry Potter look positively fascinating.

Crowley and Aziraphale, faced with the possibility that they won’t be able to get good sherry in either heaven or hell, conspire to stop Armagedeon by subtly sabotaging the Divine Plan. Their biggest enemy turns out not to be The Adversary, but their own decadent incompetence. By the time they realize, 11 years too late, that the Antichrist has been misplaced, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are getting saddled up.

Josie Lawrence (right) as Agnes Nutter

And there are other complications. The subtitle of Good Omens is “The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.” Nutter (Josie Lawrence) was the last witch burned in England, and the only person who ever wrote a book of prophecy that was actually accurate. Her distant descendant Anathema Device (Adria Arjona) has the only remaining copy of the book and, since Agnes specifically told the family to invest in Apple early, a lot of money. It’s her job to stop the Antichrist, while the descendant of the Witchfinder General who burned Agnes, played by Michael McKean, searches England for her.
Good Omens has the kind of byzantine literary plot that inevitably gets flattened into incoherence when you try to make a two-hour movie out of it. The six-part miniseries is the perfect amount of time to devote to it, and Gaiman, who wrote the scripts, knows exactly how to use the format. With Frances McDormand narrating as the Voice of God, the result is like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Apocalypse.

Tennant, the best 21st-century Doctor Who, absolutely shines as Crowley. He puts his whole lithe body into the performance. Even glimpsed in silhouette as he rescues his friend from Nazi spies during the London Blitz, he’s instantly recognizable. Sheen, a veteran actor who has done everything from Emperor Nero to a minor part in Twilight, is his exact opposite, a twee goody-goody who secretly wants to be talked into some fun. The par are like an infernal/holy version of Molly and Amy from Booksmart, and every minute they’re on screen together is electric.

Gaiman and Sherlock director Douglas MacKinnon fearlessly play with form, such as in the third episode which stretches the cold opening out for 25 minutes before rolling the opening credits. It looks great, it’s full of twists and turns, and most importantly, it’s subtly hilarious. Some may find Good Omens too twee and byzantine for their tastes, but I’ve loved every second of it.

Good Omens

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Film/TV TV Features

High Maintenance

Ben Sinclair as The Guy

The definition of an anthology series is one that lacks recurring characters or continuing storylines. They used to be more common in the early days of television, and the form reached its apex in 1959 with The Twilight Zone, which connected its disparate scripts with merely a mood of eerie surreality. The current most prominent anthology show in the Zone template is Black Mirror — although The Twilight Zone will be getting a reboot courtesy of Jordan Peele this spring, so expect to see that name again in my column.

High Maintenance comes at the anthology series idea from a completely different angle. Instead of Serling-esque, story-driven thought experiments, every week the HBO episodic series focuses on a new character study of someone plucked from the psychic maelstrom of New York City. Like Girls, HBO’s zietgiest-y show that everyone seems to have taken turns loving and hating, High Maintenance has its origins in the DIY digital indie movement of the Aughts. It was begun in 2012 as a webseries on Vimeo by co-creators Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair, who plays The Guy, an anonymous weed dealer living in Brooklyn. Every week, The Guy delivers his wares to a new eccentric, whose life and struggles we get to glimpse for the next 15 minutes or so.

Two episodes into its third season sees the cannabis-infused series maturing, but not necessarily growing up. Until the most recent series premiere, The Guy was not so much a character as he was a framing device. His street-level view of the various potheads, sad sacks, and weirdos he meets on his appointed rounds defines the show’s nonjudgmental tone of social realism, but we don’t know much about him as a person. In “M.A.S.H.,” The Guy opens up a bit when he leaves the city to attend the funeral of a friend named Berg. The old stoner’s funeral service, populated with unreconstructed hippies who break out into a memorial jam session of questionable quality, is a quick and easy demonstration of the show’s attitude towards its characters. This is a celebration of eccentricity that approaches its creations with love, even if they can’t play banjo as well as they think they can when they’re stoned.

Moments before a stoned jam session breaks out on the season 3 premiere of High Maintenance

The second episode, “Craig,” sees the show back in the familiar physical and psychological territory of Brooklyn. In the first segment, one of Guy’s regulars named Marty (Gary Richardson) gets his bike stolen. When The Guy suggests he look for it for sale on Craigslist, Marty falls down a rabbit hole of unwanted merchandise and bartering with the strangers from the internet. He never does find that bike, but at least his apartment is much better decorated than before.

Catherine Cohen (left) as the mad flasher Darby

The second segment of “Craig” soars with a killer performance by Catherine Cohen as Darby, a mild-mannered Manhattan office worker by day who fills up her evenings by selling purloined goods on Craigslist and flashing her boobs at unsuspecting civilians. Darby the Mad Flasher meets her match when she targets a self-described sociopath in the Personals section of Craigslist. Sinclair, who directed the episode, teases out her comeuppance with a delicious slow-build, then tacks on a hilarious coda involving a taxi driver who looks like Barack Obama.

The taxi driver who looks like Barack Obama.

The most enduring legacy of digital DIY cinema has been a naturalistic acting style, but in High Maintenance, with its skillful digital camera work, minimal lighting, and slice of life storylines descended directly from Slacker, we finally see the real deal transformed into prestige television. American indie cinema is still stoned, but it’s moved out of mom’s basement, bought an RV, and landed a job with HBO.

High Maintenance

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Roma

Yalitza Aparicio as Chloe in Roma

A new film from Alfonso Cuarón is a rare treat. Roma is only his ninth film in the 27 years since Solo con Tu Pareja, his directoral debut. The four films he directed so far in the 21st century have all been various shades of masterpiece: The sexy, tragic road trip Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), the best Harry Potter movie, Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), the prescient Children of Men (2006), and the $700-million orbital juggernaut Gravity, which earned him a Best Director Academy Award.

So, why did we have to wait five years after Cuarón pumped up Warner Brother’s bottom line by half a billion dollars for a new work from the master director? The politics and economics of Hollywood are as obscure as any Byzantine court, but having seen Roma, I’m going to go with “executive cowardice” as an explanation. Because that’s usually a safe bet. An even safer bet is the Hollywood establishment’s whinge and whine when Roma, produced by Netflix instead of an old guard studio, is clearly superior to anything they put in theaters in 2018.

The heart of Roma is Yalitza Aparicio, a 25-year old preschool teacher who had never acted before Cuarón cast her as Cleo, a servant in the Mexico City home of a wealthy doctor Antonio (Fernando Grediaga). Cleo takes orders from his wife Sofia (Marina de Tavira), and nannies the couple’s four children. We meet her cleaning up dog poop left by the family’s canine, whose digestive system is apparently hyperactive. The opening shot, which layers stone, water, and sky, is the most beautiful poop joke setup in cinema history.

A lot of bad stuff happens to Cleo in Roma, but part of Cuarón’s genius is to recognize that a great film should take the viewer through a wide range of emotions, from laughter to tears and everything in between. Thus, one of our greatest living directors spends a long time lovingly photographing dog doo-doo.

I could spill a lot of words on Roma’s technical achievements. The photography, which the director did himself, is not so much black and white as it is creams and grays. Cuarón is the undisputed master of the long take. A couple of scenes in Roma are the equal of the epic, one-take battle scene in Children of Men. Most incredible is the climactic beach scene filmed at dusk with the camera looking directly into the setting sun. Cuarón even playfully throws in references to his other films, Gravity most hilariously.

Roma is, on one level, an epic story about Mexico at a political crossroads. Political violence is everywhere in Chloe’s world, but she takes little notice until it crushes her future. On another level, it’s a feminist story of male violence and irresponsibility devastating the human and natural worlds. But fundamentally, it’s a character piece about Chloe. Aparicio’s placid, yet expressive face sometimes recalls Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Hers is a brilliant, unmannered performance.

As far as the streaming vs. theater debate goes, the home theater experience of Roma is satisfying. Even on my moderately priced, consumer-level TV audio system, the sound design is outstanding. But Cuarón’s sweeping vistas of the Mexican countryside cry out to be seen on the big screen. Just when it looked like we would not get a theatrical screening of Roma, Indie Memphis has announced it will be sponsoring one on January 29 at the Paradiso. Even if you’ve already seen Roma — maybe even especially if you’ve already seen Roma — it’s not to be missed.

Roma

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Memphis Filmmaker Jonathan Pekar Creating New Animated Series

Johnathan Pekar

Jonathan Pekar, Memphis-born filmmaker, comedian, and musician has announced a major new animation project, which will launch in 2019.

“PPPI Productions hired me to write, direct and create the music for their new 30-minute cartoon series Coalition Xing,” he says via IM from Los Angeles, where he is wrapping up work on the pilot episode of the series.

The character Hatemon in still from the Coalition Xing pilot

Pekar says PPPI is a Chinese company who “have expanded into America, uniting with several former Disney creatives to produce projects for both the Chinese and American markets.”

The new show is a bilingual production intended for both Chinese and Western audiences whose characters will figure into a new theme park PPPI is developing in China.

“Coalition Xing is a 30 minute animated series geared towards edu-taining 6-to-10-year-old kids in China and the United States by cleverly using subtitles, original music, and compelling storytelling.”

This is Pekar’s first entry into the realm of animation since he graduated from the University of Southern California film program. His resume includes producing Shark Week for the Discovery Channel. But “pouring cow blood in the ocean was never my idea of edutaining,” he says. “I made that word up on a Guadalajaran island while we were filming for Shark Week — well, on a boat next to the island. ”

Pekar got his start as a teenager in Memphis playing with hardcore punks Distemper at he Antenna Club. He currently performs in two bands, the Los Angeles outfit Are You A Cop? and the Memphis band Pig Star, with Distemper guitarist George Cole.

Pekar is composing music for the Coalition Xing score.

“Dr. Herman Green, Chuck Sullivan, Richard Cushing, Will Gilbert, and many other Memphians have collaborated with me on this project,” he says. “We recorded half of the soundtrack and audio design in Memphis.”

The pilot episode will also include music from Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and Mario Lalli of Fatso Jetson.

Pekar, who has a history as a standup comedian, says it’s been easy for him to refocus his writing on a much younger audience than the ones he performs for at L.A.’s Comedy Store.

“I spend time with people that are more immature than me, if that’s even conceivable,” he says.

Pekar’s crew consists of about 38 animators, including veterans of Nickelodeon’s Teen Titans. The pilot will air in China in September. The American release date for Coalition Xing is currently up in the air, but Pekar says the early reactions to the work have exceeded his expectations.

“It was sold before it was completed,” he said.

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Tully

In the mid-1970s, film critic Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of “male gaze.” The vast majority of films, she said, were told from a male point of view, because the power structures that controlled Hollywood and all the other major film production centers of the world were overwhelmingly male. Men were the protagonists and antagonists, and women were mostly just there to be looked at. This point of view bias was so deeply ingrained in movies that it was difficult for many people of both sexes to even perceive it, much less imagine what a film devoid of male gaze would be like.

Now it’s the woke 21st century, but the vast majority of films are still headed by men, despite major initiatives by women inside and outside the industry. Tully is directed by a man (Jason Reitman, son of the legendary producer/director Ivan Reitman), but its point of view is decidedly female, thanks to the film’s other major creative partners. Diablo Cody, who broke into the business with 2007’s Juno, wrote the screenplay and produced it alongside its star, Charlize Theron.

With a little mental work, one can imagine how Tully‘s story would break out if it were from a male point of view. It would go something like this: Drew (Ron Livingston) is a hard working father whose wife Marlo (Charlize Theron) goes to great lengths to convince him to help out with the parenting duties.

Mackenzie Davis stars opposite Charlize Theron in Diablo Cody’s Tully.

Maybe the I Love Lucy version is how it looks to Drew, but that’s not how it looks to Marlo. To her, pregnant with their third child, Drew is barely there. He travels frequently for work, and when he’s home, he spends his free time slaying video game zombies. Their kindergarten age son Jonah (Asher Miles Fallica) is starting to exhibit signs of serious autism, making his transition to school very difficult. The couple’s struggles are put into sharp relief by a visit to Marlo’s brother Craig’s (director/producer Mark Duplass) enormous Modernist home, complete with servants and a nanny.

Craig, hinting at difficulties with postpartum depression Marlo had after Jonah was born, offers to foot the bill for a part-time nanny who will come in at night so Marlo can get some sleep. Drew’s pride is wounded by his more affluent brother-in-law, so at first they decline the offer, but once baby Mia is born, Marlo’s situation moves from difficult to impossible. That’s when Tully (Mackenzie Davis) arrives. Tully is the perfect helper — maybe a little too perfect. She’s almost like the female version of the male gaze trope of the quirky girlfriend who exists only to improve the life of the male comedic lead — a Manic Pixie Dream Nanny.

Tully takes its time in the wind up, but that’s okay since it gives the audience more time with Theron. She was already one of cinema’s great actresses before her immortal turn as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Since then, she’s been doing a lot of presumably well paid action leads, such as the fun but slight Atomic Blonde. Seeing her do comedy/drama naturalism is like a sip of fine wine after drinking from the box for too long. From the first shot of the film, which focuses on her ready-to-pop pregnant belly, she is photographed in a series of increasingly unflattering situations, many of which involve breast pumps. Cody’s self-aware, wisecracking dialog hasn’t found an actor who worked with it so well since Ellen Page in Juno. Theron sells it by trying to sound polite and normal while delivering cutting barbs.

Once Tully enters the scene, everyone fades to the background as the film becomes a tight two-hander between her and Marlo. Davis has masterfully handled an intense female relationship before, in Sophia Takal’s excellent Always Shine. Here, it’s less about jealous lesbian murder and more about cupcakes and self-care. But even as Marlo relaxes into the situation and accepts the help she didn’t think she needed, undercurrents of tension and subtext swirl around the two women.

Reitman and Cody try for an ambitious ending, and don’t quite stick the landing. But then again, Tully is all about the problems of excessive expectations of perfection thrust upon women in general and mothers in particular. Once you watch it, you’re going to want to do something nice for your mom.

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You Were Never Really Here

There’s an old saying that the difference between acting for the stage and the screen is that stage acting is about acting, but film acting is more about being. The intimacy of the camera exaggerates every nuance on an actor’s face, so emotions that seem natural on stage come across as grotesque and fake on screen.

There are few better be-ers in the business than Joaquin Phoenix, and You Were Never Really Here finds him be-ing all over the place. Phoenix plays a demobbed Iraq veteran named Joe who has been reduced to a shell of his former self by PTSD. Director Lynne Ramsay cannily introduces us to his tortured point of view in a long opening sequence where we see visual fragments of the aftermath of something horrific that recently happened in a dingy hotel room in Cincinnati. Joe, the battle-scarred soldier, is officially a civilian again, but he is still a man of violence and a consummate professional. Officially, he lives in New York caring for his octogenarian mother, portrayed with a charming playfulness by Judith Roberts. But his bloody work makes him a frequent traveler who maintains airtight operational security. He’s able to breeze into town, commit multiple murders, and evaporate like a cloud.

Joaquin Phoenix masters the thousand-yard stare in Lynne Ramsay’s new film.

Ramsay’s film, which was lauded at Cannes 2017 and picked up by Amazon Studios, has been compared to Taxi Driver. Indeed, there’s a fair amount of Travis Bickle in Joe. He moves easily through the underground of a New York that is teeming with humanity, but his extreme alienation has begun to wear on his sanity. Joe pops pills with abandon, but they do little to keep the vivid flashbacks at bay.

I think a more apt comparison would be to Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional. Joe’s work is dirty, but the people he’s whacking on the head with his preferred weapon, the ball-peen hammer, mostly deserve what’s coming to them. Joe’s current specialty is finding missing girls believed to be in the clutches of human traffickers, rescuing them, and dispatching the kidnapers with extreme prejudice. He deals in cash, cutouts, and dead drops, and if the client requests “make it hurt,” all the better.

Like Léon, this detached professional finds himself in a situation where he’s suddenly responsible for the well being of a young girl. Nina Votto (Ekaterina Samsonov) is the runaway daughter of a New York State Senator (Alex Manette) who has been imprisoned in a luxury brownstone. Leon finds her easily and, in a brilliant sequence told mostly by security camera footage, cleans out the nest of sex slavers in a particularly brutal manner. But then things go badly awry. Nina’s captors were much better connected than anyone Joe has ever taken on before, and Joe’s little world comes crashing down on him, along with what is left of his psyche.

Ramsay’s work is as chilling as it is technically flawless. She’s an avid practitioner of the Kubrick Stare — Phoenix seems to stay blank and immobile for an uncomfortably long time before springing into ultraviolence. She and cinematographer Thomas Townsend get a lot of mileage out of symmetrical shots contrasting Joe’s increasingly disheveled and bloody presence and the domestic banality of Brooklyn and New Jersey. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood composed the floaty score, but the soundtrack makes great use of New York’s terrible plague of soft rock radio, both for creepy counter-scoring and to create a sense of place.

You Were Never Really Here seems like a rebuke to the John Wicks of the world. The Keanu Reeves character is a dapper professional killer with a supernaturally competent supporting cast based out of a chain of luxury hotels. Joe, on the other hand, takes his payoffs in brown manila envelopes hidden in the backrooms of bodegas. John Wick stages mass murder as a kind of hyper-violent ballet. Director Ramsay is more concerned with the aftermath of violence. Her elliptical editing reveals the effects — bloody hammers, personal effects gathered for clandestine disposal — without glamorizing the cause. And while Wick is portrayed as a kind of benevolent, detached angel of death, Joe is haunted by the horrors he has seen and caused. Ramsay’s version of the professional may not be as commercial as John Wick’s, but it is no less slick — and much more truthful.

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The Get Down

As I watched The Get Down, I felt the slow realization that I don’t think Baz Luhrmann understands how narrative works.

Over the course of his 26-year film career, from the slick exploitation of Strictly Ballroom to his wildly overblown take on The Great Gatsby, he’s certainly proven he knows how to create spectacle. The Get Down is a vision of the birth of hip-hop as Olympian myth. Empowered by a free-spending Netflix, Luhrmann seems to have been encouraged to go more fully Luhrmann-esque than ever before. In his hands, the Brooklyn of 1977 is a hallucinatory war zone populated by characters of operatic breadth. The cast are all relative newcomers, led by Justice Smith as Zeke, a young poet whom we meet on the edge of becoming a proto-MC. His love interest is a singer named Mylene (Herizen F. Guardiola), and his mentor is a mysterious DJ named Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore), and together they set out to conquer the world through tight flow and sick beats.

Justice Smith (left) dips Herizen F. Guardiola in The Get Down.

Or something like that. It’s really hard to fathom what is going on, plot-wise, at any given moment. Luhrmann seems incapable of concentrating on a storyline for more than three or four shots — and that’s only if there’s some kind of interesting movement taking place that he can track in some outrageous Dutch angle. He treats emotion the same way he treats color, splashing it across the screen for garish effect. Take his use of the great Giancarlo Esposito as Mylene’s father, the puritanical Pastor Ramon. Here’s an actor with superhuman control to spin a tapestry of conflicting emotion on his face, but Luhrmann sets him on one speed — “righteous rage.”

Lurhmann’s not using his actors to their full potential, but the same can’t be said of his production designer and cinematographers. The Get Down is one great frame after another, stuffed with detail, and connected by more whip pans and smash cuts than the 1966 Batman. It’s this manic inventiveness that’s always been the attraction to the director’s fans, and it’s here in spades. It might not be so much that the director doesn’t understand how to construct a narrative as he just doesn’t care. There’s no recognizable human psychology, but often The Get Down reads like one of the best long-form music video projects since Thriller. Letting the beautiful dancing people, the bumping soundtrack, and the hot-shot construction wash over is a pretty pleasant use of an hour or so, even if its lack of clear story renders it emotionally flat.

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Stranger Things

Unlike a movie studio or traditional broadcast network, Netflix is not in the business of appealing to a mass audience with each new release. Instead, for their original productions, the streaming service tries to create shows that will find a niche audience. The business model for a show like NBC’s America’s Got Talent involves delivering ads to the largest number of people at once. But Netflix doesn’t sell ads. It sells subscriptions, and its execs know that it will only take one great show to hook someone into paying that monthly fee. Netflix doesn’t release rating numbers, but shows such as Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Sense8, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have enjoyed critical praise while amassing large enough loyal audiences to justify their existence. In the traditional advertising model, the interests of the networks are more closely aligned with their advertisers, but selling subscriptions directly to the audience switches that allegiance to the fans.

The latest successful product of this realignment of forces is Stranger Things. Netflix took a chance on a pair of twin brothers from North Carolina, Matt and Ross Duffer, a pair of newbies with a killer pitch: What if we remade all of the films of the 1980s at once? Well, not all ’80s movies, just the low- to mid-budget sci-fi and horror films of the type Hollywood rarely makes any more. Like The Goonies, the heart of the story lies with a group of precocious kids. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is introduced as the dungeon master in the midst of the weekly Dungeons and Dragons session with fellow tween dweebs Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Will (Noah Schnapp). After a 10-hour bout of snack food and polyhedral dice, the boys bike home, but Will is intercepted in the dark woods of rural Indiana by a sinister, faceless monster who kidnaps the boy into a spooky parallel dimension that resembles the spirit world from Poltergeist. The next morning, Will’s mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder), calls the police, sending Chief Hopper (David Harbour) on a search for the missing boy.

Winona Ryder

Meanwhile, a young girl wanders out of the woods. Disoriented and almost mute, she has a shaved head and a tattoo on her wrist identifying her as “11.” When the owner of a diner offers her aid, a group of shadowy government agents show up in pursuit. Led by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), the staff of Hawkins National Laboratory seem to be somehow involved with the monster’s parallel universe and responsible for Eleven’s telekinetic powers, whose depths are slowly revealed as the series progresses through eight episodes.

Matarazzo, Brown, and Wolfhard channel ’80s horror.

The Duffer Brothers follow the Tarantino formula of creating a pastiche out of loosely related genre films, taking images and moments from films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Stand by Me, and Flight of the Navigator and sculpting them into something fresh. Stranger Things subverts as it mimics. Mike’s older sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), escapes the sexual punishment aspect of ’80s horror, while her prudish bestie, Barb (Shannon Purser), disappears into the netherworld. The crumbling Midwest of the Reagan era is painstakingly reconstructed, and the Duffers’ meticulous world-building pays off again and again, such as the way they luxuriate in 1983’s lack of cell phones, allowing them to keep information selectively hidden from their characters while letting the audience in on the bigger picture.

None of that would work without good characters, and Stranger Things has those in abundance, led by Winona Ryder in pedal-to-the-metal parental hysterics mode. The other adult standout is Harbour as the deeply damaged police chief, haunted by memories of his dead child. The heart of the show is Millie Brown as Eleven, whose combination of spooky intensity and wide-eyed innocence personifies the appeal of Stranger Things.

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The X-Files

In the premiere of the six-episode miniseries reboot of The X-Files, agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) meets Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale), a right-wing talk show host in the mold of Glenn Beck. As he is about to get into O’Malley’s limo, Mulder snidely remarks that paranoia has made the younger man rich. Back in the 1990s, conspiracy was a cottage industry Mulder ran out of the basement of the FBI’s Washington office. In 2016, it’s the founding sentiment of the Tea Party, and thus big business.

Organized political paranoia is not new to 2016, nor was it new to 1993, when Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) was assigned to keep tabs on Fox “Spooky” Mulder’s paranormal investigations. In his 1964 essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter traced conspiratorial thinking back to the 1797 publication of a book called Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Government of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies.

Hofstadter’s focus was on the right-wing, anti-communist paranoia that had birthed the House Un-American Activities Committee and the John Birch Society, whose crackpot beliefs about water fluoridation were immortalized by Sterling Hayden’s General Jack Ripper character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. But in 1964, there was another strain of the paranoia virus spreading to the left. The Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was released less than a month before “The Paranoid Style,” and people were already finding holes in its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. As the 1960s rolled on, with more assassinations, riots, war in Vietnam, and general social chaos, the radicalized left began to take what Hofstadter called “the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy.”

The American cinema of paranoia began in 1962 with The Manchurian Candidate, where Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh uncover a Communist brainwashing plot. The spy genre jumped onboard the paranoia train in 1965 with The Ipcress File, whose dark vision contrasted with the swinging Bond films. In the 1970s, Warren Beatty starred in The Parallax View, Robert Redford went undercover in Three Days of the Condor, and Dustin Hoffman was tortured by secret Nazi Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man.

The 1970s were also the heyday of the paranormal, with public interest spiking for UFOs, cryptozoology, and the Bermuda Triangle. Spielberg drew on this rich vein of weirdness for his 1977 masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which defined the visual style of The X-Files.

The apex of the conspiracy genre came in 1991 with Oliver Stone’s epic JFK, which earned its Best Editing Academy Award in a breathless sequence where Donald Sutherland lays out the details of the conspiracy to kill the president to Kevin Costner. The same year, Duchovny portrayed an FBI agent on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Chris Carter successfully synthesized those threads into The X-Files, whose nine-year run peaked in 1997 with almost 20 million weekly viewers. He pioneered the contemporary television formula of long-form storytelling sprinkled with stand-alone, “monster of the week” episodes. So in this age of retreads, it seems like a natural choice for a revival.

But the premiere of the six-episode miniseries reveals that the 1990s conspiracy formula doesn’t adapt well to the post-9/11 world. Duchovny remains his charming, if slightly wooden, self, and Anderson’s take on Scully is more confident and subtle. The leads’ onscreen chemistry is stronger than ever, but since Mulder and Scully have actually had a (possibly alien hybrid) baby together in the show’s later seasons, the Sam-and-Diane, will-they-or-won’t-they tension is missing from their relationship. Carter’s writing, on the other hand, is a lifeless attempt to graft 1990s paranoia onto today’s more hard-edged, legitimately scary right-wing worldview. The premiere’s attempt at emulating JFK‘s immortal Mr. X sequence falls flat. Even worse, Carter’s instincts for suspense seem to have failed him. It was years before Mulder saw a real UFO in the show’s original run, but he touches one in the first 30 minutes of the reboot.

Still, all the pieces are in place, and the miniseries’ third episode, “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” written and directed by Glen Morgan, whose “José Chung’s From Outer Space” is the best episode of the original series, looks promising. But after the lackluster premiere, the miniseries may only be satisfying to those who want to believe.

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Jessica Jones

As Marvel continues to infect our lives with stridently competent comic book adaptations, it’s nice to see what they produce actually be about something. Previous incarnations dealt with joy (Guardians of the Galaxy) and the security state (Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Jessica Jones deals with rape.

Kilgrave (David Tennant) is a walking nightmare. His power is mind control. He’s constantly using and throwing away people to serve his immediate needs, sexual and otherwise, which results in support groups, self-medication, discussions of the cycle of abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. This is unique for a mainstream narrative. Like Preacher‘s Jesse Custer, he can compel someone to his will just by speaking to them. At any point in the story, he will walk into the room with a purple suit and a sneer and demand strangers do his bidding. His attitude is one of entitlement to other people’s bodies, and dismissive sarcasm to empathy. His most frequent dictum is a short, curt “Leave.” His one passion is stalking Krysten Ritter’s title character, a superpowered private eye who deals with having been in his mental grasp by descending into alcoholism.

Krysten Ritter in Jessica Jones

Jones is a Hulk-Buffy variant wrapped in friendly Marvel packaging. She can’t kill her nemesis because she needs to prove he compelled a victim to murder; he won’t kill her because he professes love. This makes for a wonderful fluidity between hero and villain. He shows up to talk, and it’s terrifying. We could have gotten a version of this character that delves into the mind control aspect as wish fulfillment, and his British accent as suave. (He is often seen with women and money, or having people take his insults literally.) Instead the emphasis is on what it feels like to have your mind scrambled.

In the support group Jones starts, victims talk about a loss of identity and being overcome by shame for things as simple as Kilgrave asking for their jacket. Ritter is great at both snappy dialogue and weightier PTSD moments. She enlists a large number of allies, including fellow comic book heroes Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor). Kilgrave’s horror is the show’s star, unusually scary for a Marvel villain. His dialogue is often textbook chauvinistic defenses of sexual assault, and his psychology based on abuse as a child: the medical experiments which gave him his powers, done by his parents.

Like other Marvel entertainment, there are tonally off supporting characters, once and future comic-book plots awkwardly grafted on, and wastes of good actors. The ending is anticlimactic, the action repetitive kick-punching.

Overall, it says something. Showrunner Melissa Rosenberg has said she was trying to make a blatant corrective to the use of sexual assault as a plot device on shows like Game of Thrones, where no time or realism is given to the psychology of victims or perpetrators. The result is a corporate product that has the ring of something honest and direct.