8 Best TV Shows Similar to Somos.
Apples Never Fall
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 →
The Regime
It might help some to think of The Regime less as satire and more as dark farce with political opinions. Yes, there’s nothing especially new here in the series’ send-up of a paranoid autocrat, Chancellor Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet), whose withdrawal from the larger world has brought an ever-decreasing grasp of reality. But sometimes, it is enough for a story to just make you laugh and feel sick with fear for the real world. Much like creator Will Tracy’s The Menu, The Regime's advertisements suggest a different viewing experience than it delivers. And, as with that film, the audience risks missing a nasty treat if they don’t meet the series where it lives. The film arrived when “Eat the Rich” entertainment seemed to be spiking. However, The Menu’s focus didn’t lie with economics, at least not solely or predominantly. The Regime hits MAX as America is facing an eight-month nightmare Presidential election campaign goosed by the worst human being you’ve ever known, armed with his naked desire to rule entirely for personal gain and without even the slightest hint of criticism. However, the show’s goal isn’t a six-episode allegory on the excesses of executive power. The dialogue, from an array of writers including Tracy and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies writer Sarah DeLappe, often suggests Veep with a less dexterous tongue. It keeps the palace intrigue fun and quick even when it the notes feel quite familiar. The willingness to spike international incidents with amoral verbal tartness is a delight. 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 →
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 →
The Vanishing Triangle
The Vanishing Triangle takes its name from media shorthand for an approximately 80-mile area in Eastern Ireland. For almost 20 years, from the late 70s to the late 90s, the Triangle suffered through several unsolved crimes. The victims, women ranging from teens to in their thirties, disappeared at an alarming rate. Additionaly, several murders of women in the area during the period were frequently linked in the press. Some speculated a serial killer's (or serial killers's) involvement, but the Gardaí—Ireland’s national police—never made such a declaration. As The Irish Times noted, “the ‘vanishing triangle’ phenomenon [is] a media creation rather than a Garda theory.” Continue Reading →
The Fall of the House of Usher
The most gripping moment in 2022’s Academy Award-winning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is when members of the now disgraced Sackler Family, whose pharmaceutical company manufactured and marketed the highly addictive painkiller Oxy-Contin, are ordered to attend a virtual hearing in which they're confronted by families who had been impacted by the drug. Listening to tragic stories of accidental overdoses, birth defects, and young men cut down in their prime due to a prescription medication that had been promoted as safe and non-addicting, the Sacklers could not look more bored, even slightly annoyed. It’s a chilling reminder that extreme wealth often results in a loss of empathy, if not one’s entire soul. Continue Reading →
Echo 3
There’s nothing wrong with adaptations finding their own path. In fact, it should be encouraged. Slavish devotion to the source material leads to dramatically inert material. That said, there are far better ways to adapt existing works than this. Echo 3’s team, led by series creator Mark Boal, has missed the mark in interpreting Amir Gutfreund’s novel When Heroes Fly and the first television adaption from Omri Givon. Continue Reading →