6 Best TV Shows Similar to Tales of the South Seas
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
The Tattooist of Auschwitz opens on Lale Sokolov (Harvey Keitel in the 2000s “present-day” sequences) living in Australia. He's decided the time has come to commit his life story to paper. A nurse with writing aspirations Heather Morris (Melanie Lynskey), (the real-life writer behind the inspired by actual events but labeled historical fiction source material) is referred by someone in the community to help. With little prologue, he dives in, describing how he "volunteered" for a program about defending Jewish communities. Unfortunately, it was a trap. The train ride takes him to Auschwitz instead. While imprisoned there, he (Jonah Hauer-King in flashbacks) became one of the tattooists. The position leads him to meet the love of his life, fellow prisoner Gita Furman (Anna Próchniak). Additionally, the position gave him a certain level of consideration not accorded to others, including access to medications. On the other hand, he faces resentment among the prisoners and decades of survivor’s guilt. The book—and its two subsequent spinoffs/sequels—has a certain amount of controversy surrounding it. While I’m not an expert on the Holocaust, I feel it is at least important to acknowledge that fact. Wanda Witek-Malicka from the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center publicly worried that the book engaged in excessive “exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements” that could render its text “dangerous and disrespectful to history.” Continue Reading →
The Spiderwick Chronicles
As the opening minutes of Roku's The Spiderwick Chronicles is all too glad to remind us, "This is a dark fairy tale." A decidedly on-the-nose sentiment to blurt out to an audience in its beginning seconds, to be sure, but that matches the vibe of the series: A lot of spells, but very little magic. The show was rescued by Roku after Disney+ cut it in 2023 after completing the series; the move was ostensibly to cut costs, part of the streaming squeeze we're all going through as streamers start realizing it doesn't quite pay to firehouse out an endless stream of expensive content. But based on what we've seen, they may have been on to something. Based on the early-aughts children's fantasy novels by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi and updated by Aron Eli Coleite, the show offers a coincidentally similar premise to Coleite's prior show, Netflix's Locke & Key: A mom and three siblings moving to their family's ancestral home in the wake of losing their father (here, it's to divorce), only to find magical secrets that lie inside. In Spiderwick, that family is the Graces, each of which has their own distinct quirks but not a lot of space to develop beyond them. There are twin brothers Jared (Lyon Daniels) and Simon (Noah Cottrell), the former with mental health issues and the latter with a chip on his shoulder about leaving their dad behind. Older sister Mallory (Mychala Lee) is a fencing prodigy whose meticulous life planning may be her biggest weakness. Mother Helen (Joy Bryant) is doing her best to hold the family together, all while trying to deal with her institutionalized Aunt Lucinda (a small but powerful guest turn from Charlayne Woodard), who continually goes on about boggarts and ogres and faeries. The Spiderwick Chroniciles (Roku) But based on the house they move in, the creaky, ancient Spiderwick estate, with its labyrinthine tunnels, and the large tree that grows in the middle of the foyer, there may be something to Aunt Lucinda's mutterings (and, it turns out, Jared's visions). Turns out their relative, Arthur Spiderwick (Arthur Jones), spent his life chronicling the fantastical creatures and artifacts he came across in his varying travels, collecting them all in a Field Guide that the kids happen upon not too far into the series. Trouble is, they're not the only ones looking for the guide: maniacal ogre Mulgarath (Christian Slater) wants it too, and for hardly altruistic reasons. Continue Reading →
Franklin
Michael Douglas's career so deeply connects him to as specific kind of late 20th/early 21st Century man. As a result, throwing him back to the 18th Century and into the body of Benjamin Franklin feels deeply counterintuitive. It is not surprising that Franklin—an adaptation of the book A Great Improvisation by Stacy Schiff—is one of the few period projects Douglas has done, joining the likes of The Ghost and the Darkness and those flashback scenes in the Ant-Man films. What is surprising, and to the series’ credit, is how quickly that strangeness recedes. It isn’t that Douglas manages to fade into the role of Franklin until he disappears entirely, but he does manage to recede enough that he doesn’t disrupt the show’s reality. In some ways, Douglas proves a surprisingly apt selection. No stranger to playing womanizers on screen, Douglas easily finds the correct valence to portray Franklin’s specific flavor of late 18th-century skirt chaser. The metacommentary works in his favor as well, an aging icon who retains much of his skill but perhaps can no longer command the same buzz or box office returns embodying an aging icon whose mind remains sharp but whose body—and possibly will—has been beaten up by life and time. While almost a decade older than the Franklin he’s portraying, Douglas also excels at the moments where the audience witnesses the statesman energized like old times. Thibault de Montalembert has neither the time nor the interest in your lame attempts at Call My Agent/Dix pour cent joke attempts. (AppleTV+) Still, the script too frequently hamstrings the actor. Not bad by any means, the writing still suffers for trying to match Franklin’s reputation. It’s the old conundrum of trying to build a series, film, or play around a singular piece of art. How does a creator convince the audience that someone is singing the most fantastic song ever without truly writing the most fantastic song ever? Similarly, how do writers provide dialogue to what is, by historical reputation, one of the greatest wits in American History without simply quoting his greatest hits? Continue Reading →
The Sympathizer
"All wars are fought twice. The first on the battlefield. The second time in memory." This line, emblazed in Vietnamese and English in the opening moments of The Sympathizer, is taken right from Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen's bestselling novel of the same name. Fittingly, it also serves as the thesis statement for Max's adaptation of the sprawling work, a fleet-of-foot miniseries that explores the malleability of identity and perception through the lens of the Vietnam War, and the dynamic lenses through which our lives and conflicts can be viewed. That duality is encapsulated in the titular character, a French-Vietnamese biracial protagonist known only as The Captain (Hoa Xuande). From his childhood in Vietnam, he was always ostracized for being neither white nor Asian enough; his only solace came from his two friends, Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan) and Man (Duy Nguyen), who instead frame his heritage as being "twice of everything." Cut to Vietnam in the '70s, in the days leading up to the Fall of Saigon: He works for the Vietnamese Secret Police, interrogating Viet Cong prisoners at the behest of his arrogant martinet of a boss, The General (Toan Le). But he's also a communist mole, feeding information back to Man, who's now his North Vietnamese Army handler, and his daily life is a struggle to reconcile all of these varying identities. That struggle is further compounded after the Fall of Saigon (an escape attempt rendered in the first episode as an exciting, terrifying barrage of booming explosions and a foot race to a fleeing cargo plane). The Captain and Bon make it to America, though not without some heartbreaking losses for the latter; now, the two are alone, the Captain still required to report on the General's activities while laying low for both his CIA handlers and the LA cultural figures who treat him as an object of curiosity. Continue Reading →
All the Light We Cannot See
Early in For All Mankind Season 4, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Dani Poole (Krys Marshall) reencounter each other for the first time in years on the Happy Valley Mars base. Smiling warmly, each says, “Hi, Bob,” to each other. For fans of the show, it has an immediate impact. The significance of the silly greeting reminds those audience members of the deep bond between these two astronauts. Newcomers likely won’t grasp the specifics of the importance, but Marshall and Kinnaman’s performances make it quite clear that it isn’t some random bit of silliness. Continue Reading →