Thanks to proliferating streaming and premium channels, there’s too much TV to watch and no digital equivalent of “TV Guide” that I’ve found to help separate the wheat from the chaff. You’re stuck with trial and error. Here’s a report from the threshing floor.
First, one’s viewing life seems increasingly to be dominated dramas described as “genre-bending” or “mash-ups.” There’s nothing new in this. Shakespeare was a master of the game and even made fun of it, having Polonius praise the players as the best in the world for “pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical.”
I understand that the creators of entertainment may get bored recycling the same old genres that movies and TV have relied on for a century — weepies, oaters, swashbucklers, noirs, whodunits, biopics, romcoms. Still, you knew what to expect. As Kenneth Burke famously said, “Form is a satisfied expectation.” That is, a sonnet is 14 lines rhymed in a certain way, a tragedy is a hero undone by his own hubris, and so forth. The trick is creating something original within such constraints.
Most often the melding of two genres seems intended to please two audiences, but is likely to satisfy neither unless an actual reason exists for doing the trick. The result can seem like complication for its own sake, creating a work that is too clever by half, literally.
“Altered Carbon” (Netflix) is alleged sci-fi, but is actually nothing more than a noir detective story where the rich and powerful are up to no good. It’s just that, in this neighborhood, those with enough money can transfer their consciousness to as many spare bodies as they can afford. Who cares? At its heart it’s still Phillip Marlowe, a man of honor prowling the mean streets in search of justice. The main reason to watch this farrago is the female lead, Martha Higareda. She is new to me but apparently a considerable star in her native Mexico. She steals every scene she’s in.
“Counterpart” (Starz) is essentially a Cold War spy thriller even down to its setting, Berlin. It is tarted up by imaging two parallel universes where everyone has an almost identical twin, and espionage and sabotage take place across a Checkpoint Charlie sort of passageway. Is the sci-fi embroidery necessary? Not really,
It does gives the admirable J.K. Simmons a chance to play two very different parts, an uxorious, innocuous government functionary and a brutally efficient undercover operative. The
murky plot generates some suspense, as one side of the divide blames the other for a plague it has suffered and seeks vengeance. And the cast includes first rate performers including Stephen Rea, Olivia Williams, Nazanin Boniadi, Sara Serraiocco, and Richard Schiff — each more untrustworthy than the one before.
A couple of episodes in, it looks like Bill Hader as ”Barry” (HBO) will be fun. He plays a sad sack contract killer whose pursuit of his latest target leads him unwittingly into an acting class. He decides L.A. and acting look like more fun than murdering people in Cleveland. Far from being original, this particular genre straddle is habitual enough to qualify as a sub-genre. “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “Mr. Right,” “You Kill Me,” “The Whole Nine Yards.”
“Marseille” (Netflix) has Gerard Depardieu as the long-time mayor of that city beset by a sea of troubles — organized crime, an ailing wife, and a substance abuse problem. He’s ready to turn over the job to a protégée who suddenly betrays his trust. The show poses as a political noir, but turns out to be a family saga/soap opera on the order of “Dallas” or “Dynasty.” It comes complete with long hidden, dirty secrets, questions of paternity, cheating spouses, drug addiction, careless love, a tragic disease, election meddling, graft, and plenty of betrayal. The only thing missing is amnesia, but stay tuned. Or not.
“Here and Now” (HBO) is essentially one of those shows about a prosperous, dysfunctional but loving family, like “Brothers and Sisters,” “This Is Us,” and so on. Here the Portland, Oregon parents, Tim Robbins and Holly Hunter, are having their midlife crises as their ethnically-diverse adult, adopted children screw up in various ways. Except, one of them has hallucinations that turn out not to be mental illness but psychic visions channelling his shrink’s own troubled past. Really? Is this trope necessary?
Best for last is the British miniseries “Collateral” whose genre one is tempted to say is David Hare. The esteemed playwright is a master of crafting griping entertainments that have embedded in them a scathing critique of politics, patriarchy, anti-semitism, the national security state, or whatever bad news gets his dander up. His plays, films and movies include “The Hours,” “Damage,” “The Reader,” “Denial,” “Plenty,” and “Skylight.”
The Worricker trilogy of TV dramas was a spy thriller that took aim at corruption and usurpation of power at MI6. “Collateral” appears to be a simple, police procedural about a London murder of a pizza delivery boy, but a superb Carey Mulligan refuses to take the crime at face value when things don’t add up. This is her first big case as a detective, she is in the advanced stages of pregnancy, her sexist superiors expect her to screw it up, yet she is tougher than any of them and doggedly pursues the evidence where it leads.
The ripples of the pizza boy shooting spread out to expose a web of deceit and criminality including illegal immigration, human trafficking, parliamentary complicity, and even willful blindness and bigotry at the Church of England. Too much? No, just enough. Cleverly written, and Mulligan, though familiar in plucky ingenue roles, here performs in a whole new key.
Also excellent are Nicola Walker and Billie Piper, probably most familiar to American audiences from “Last Tango in Halifax” and “Penny Dreadful,” respectively. The prominence of actresses is no accident since a subtext of the piece is the mistreatment and disrespect accorded women by individuals, co-workers, and institutions — everything from Church to State. A reminder that in the hands of a master, a lowly genre can be the vehicle for dramatic art.