3 Best TV Shows Similar to Nacho
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 New Look
Apple TV+'s latest miniseries blends fashion with fascism in its dramatization of the couture wars of the 1940s and '50s. Across the crowded ballroom, Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) spies Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) in the arms of a Nazi officer. War and occupation are chaos for everyone, yet these two legends of fashion couldn’t have chosen more different paths through the fog. Todd A. Kessler’s new series for AppleTV, The New Look, fashions history and gossip and tells the diverging stories of these designers with a simplicity that blossoms as the series completes its ten-episode parade. The first three episodes, which make up the pilot drop, see us through the Nazi occupation of Paris and the end of World War II. The rest of the series will trace the fallout from the choices made during the war and return us to the 1950s, where our series begins with Dior, now the face of fashion, lecturing to students at The Sorbonne. After a dizzying display of fabulous designs, cementing that this series considers fashion a wearable art, Monsieur Dior opens the floor for questions. Immediately, he is confronted with accusations that he kept designing for Nazi girlfriends while others like Coco Chanel closed their shop. But, as Dior says with a sigh, there is a “truth behind the truth.” Continue Reading →
FEUD
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 →