Apples Never Fall
NetworkPeacock,
SimilarA Fortunate Life, A Little Princess,
Agatha Christie's Poirot Anna Karenina, Återkomsten, Atomic Train, Blackeyes, Brides of Christ, Cleopatra, Dancing on the Edge, Dead by Sunset, Dexter, Elizabeth R, Fallen, Game of Thrones, Gossip Girl, Intruders, Jewels, M*A*S*H, More than Blue: The Series, Murder in the Heartland, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,
Planet of the Apes Pope John Paul II,
Pride and Prejudice Scully,
Sherlock Holmes Soul Land 2: The Peerless Tang Clan, Tales from the Neverending Story, The 4400, The Buccaneers, The Lost World, The Murder of Mary Phagan, The Shining, Unterleuten: The Torn Village, World War II: When Lions Roared, Wycliffe,
The expression, “The book was better,” has become a truism in adaptation, an assumption where the few exceptions only prove the rule. But what’s a creator to do when the source material is deeply flawed?
If you’re Apples Never Fall creator Melanie Marnich, you make several cosmetic changes to Liane Moriarty’s novel. The drama moves from Australia to West Palm Beach. The four Delaney children—Troy (Jake Lacy), Brooke (Essie Randles), Amy (Alison Brie), and Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner)—are no longer uniformly tall and olive-skinned. Quite the opposite, really, on the skin tone front. Relationships are shuffled a bit. Unfortunately, these changes fail to elevate the series.
The broad strokes of the plot itself are intriguing. The Delaney parents Joy (Annette Bening) and Stan (Sam Neill) have finally retired from a lifetime of running a tennis center, including their own stints as players and coaches. Rather than a delightful occasion, it churns up all manner of unprocessed relationship issues. Stan is cantankerous and competitive, oscillating between diminishing everyone around him with words and beating them all over the court. Joy, on the other hand, expected to spend her golden years catching up with her children, who lack the time or interest in doing the same. Continue Reading →
FEUD
NetworkFX,
SimilarA Little Princess, Alias Grace, Amazing Stories, Anna Karenina, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Brides of Christ, Cleopatra, Cruel Summer, Dancing on the Edge, Dead by Sunset, Elizabeth R, Fallen, Further Tales of the City, Intruders, Jack the Ripper, Jewels, More Tales of the City, Murder in the Heartland, Murder Most Horrid, Pope John Paul II,
Pride and Prejudice Sentimental Journey, Son of the Morning Star, The Buccaneers, The Gangster Chronicles, The Gold Robbers, The Murder of Mary Phagan, The Phantom of the Opera, The Shining, The Wimbledon Poisoner, Troubles, Unorthodox, Viso d'angelo, Witchcraft, World War II: When Lions Roared,
Studio20th Television,
Gus Van Sant & Jon Robin Baitz collaborate on a miniseries rich in both vintage style & human drama.
Nora Ephron once said “Everything is copy.” When you’re a writer, anything you see, experience, or hear, even in confidence, might be filed away to use as creative fodder later, despite the potentially sketchy ethics of it. If you’re lucky, maybe your friends won’t recognize themselves quite as easily as the friends of Truman Capote did when he wrote “La Côte Basque, 1965,” a short story published in Esquire. Though the story purported to be fiction, it was thinly veiled fiction at best. So thin, in fact, you could see right through it.
The events leading up to the publication of Capote’s work in 1975, and the fallout afterward, is the focus of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, a limited series that at first blush looks like it’s going to be camp nonsense in the vein of the interminable Real Housewives franchise, but has a deep sense of melancholy at its core. With the first four episodes directed by Gus Van Sant, where an easy approach would be to clearly delineate villains and heroes from the beginning, instead it offers something a little more complicated, and asks some uncomfortable questions about friendship, creativity, and trust. Continue Reading →
American Horror Story
A quick overview of the high highs and middling disappointments in horror this year.
With the social media app formerly known as Twitter now a shell of its former self, horror fans have been forced to return to Facebook to continue such interminable debates as “What does or doesn’t qualify something as ‘horror’?” “What the hell is ‘elevated horror,’ anyway?” “Are remakes inherently bad?” “Have horror movies gotten too ‘woke’?” “Were we wrong for letting women make horror?”
In a year when both David Gordon Green and M. Night Shyamalan released new movies, the horror discourse was especially spicy, and that’s before we get to the really interesting stories, like the surprise viral success of Skinamarink, which, with the way time seems to be passing nowadays, feels like it was released five years ago. Both indie and mainstream horror made daring choices, not looking to appeal to as broad a range of audiences as possible, and treating the genre as a serious art form, as opposed to just a machine that prints money. But the biggest surprise came in October, with the release of Saw X, the tenth film in a seemingly unkillable franchise, which ended up being one of the best, most coherent entries in the entire series. Continue Reading →
Welcome to Wrexham
NetworkFX,
Studio3 Arts Entertainment, FX Productions,
Welcome to Wrexham Season 2 opens with Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney telling the audience, directly to camera, that they’ve spoken to the King of England. It’s a good gag, with both demonstrating their talents for comedic timing. It is also the kind of thing that makes avowed anti-Royalists and fans of Season 1—of which this critic is both—a bit nervous. Continue Reading →
Swarm
Every episode of Amazon’s Swarm begins with a title card that reads, “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional.” Continue Reading →
The Thing About Pam
NetworkNBC,
SimilarStar-Crossed Lovers,
The thing about The Thing About Pam is that there’s no thing there. Tonally run amuck, the limited series is a whimsical take on a deadly serious story that can’t come to grips with its darkness. There are moments to enjoy, but overall the series does little to prove itself necessary. There’s a lot of play happening, but little of it is constructive. Continue Reading →
Scream: The TV Series
KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer.
Pretty Peggy Johns (Sian Barbara Allen) wants to do her best for the environment. Yet while she rides her bicycle, bell-bottoms billowing, through the California hills to Elliot Mansion in Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973), the most ecological thing she does is star in the film, which is assembled entirely from recycled plots and recycled stars.
Scream, Pretty Peggy and The Screaming Woman are two new-to-Blu-ray TV-movie thrillers from the early 1970s starring dames of Classical Hollywood. Each is a knowing hodgepodge of different Hollywood horror tropes that, instead of languishing in “hagsploitation” hell, allows its special guest star to shine. Continue Reading →
Pose
NetworkFX,
SimilarOranges Are Not the Only Fruit,
StudioFX Productions,
A lot of the discourse surrounding Pose tends to focus on how groundbreaking it is, and rest assured Ryan Murphy’s drama is certainly that. Prior to the 2010s, queer media almost exclusively focused on the G in LGBT+ and most of those gay men were white and cis. By contrast, Pose’s main cast stars people of color, most of whom are trans. This diversity is behind the camera as well, being partially created by Steve Canals with writing and directing credits by Janet Mock and Our Lady J. Continue Reading →