[Hot Tea] March 1st - April 14th 2023
Serving #23
Readers, now that the 2022 film year has ended, I’d like to resume taking a regular look at everything new and streaming, especially on television. This past month and a half saw the release of several new seasons of popular and acclaimed series, and I’m eager to cover them, plus a few under-the-radar selections, in this new serving of Hot Tea.
On tap specifically we have (among others) a modern classic comedy’s final season premiere, two dark dramas’ series premieres, and the return of a pretty sing-ular musical. (See what I did there?)
“I’ll drink to that!” ☕️🫖
Beef (Season 1)
Netflix • Drama • Red and Bloody
Synopsis
A parking lot disagreement between drivers accelerates the internal combustion of their lives, personal and professional.
My take
Steven Yeun is acting his face off and — wow — what an amazing role for him to sink his teeth into: Well-written, atypical, and emotionally broad, Yeun’s Danny Cho, I can confidently say, is the most exciting performance on a current series I’m aware of. With this role, following an ‘Actor in a Leading Role’ Oscar nomination for Minari (Chung, 2020) and an acclaimed (and nearly nominated) supporting performance in Nope (Peele, 2022), Yeun is cementing himself as one of our premiere actors, capable of intense emotional depth as well as breadth. I’m genuinely excited to see what he takes on next.
And, in the larger sense, it doesn’t surprise me at all that A24, the production studio that this past year took home 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture, is behind this new series; the studio has been pushing toward strong, high-quality content for years and seems lately to be hitting its stride, with critics, audiences, and awarding bodies alike.
Ali Wong satisfies opposite Yeun, as his character’s foil, while Young Mazino and David Choe turn in solid supporting performances as that character’s younger brother and Wong’s character’s husband, respectively. Together with Mario Bello in a comically wicked recurring role, the ensemble shocks and delights as a pithy commentary on ambition, personal urgency, and their joint conflicts with the pursuit of leisure in a wealth- and pleasure-minded society. Beep beep — bravo!
Temperature check
Hot (Piping)
Tetris (2023)
Apple TV+ • Drama • A Heist So Nice, They Nested It Twice
Synopsis
An entrepreneur tries to bring a break through Soviet-American politics, to bring a Russian video game title legally to market in the West.
My take
Would-be Oscar nominee Taron Egerton plays a determined Dutch-American(-Japanese?) father on the brink of international espionage for the sake of a single Soviet video game he feels confident will take the world by storm: Tetris. The beauty of the narrative tension (and the cost of doing business) in this story is that, of course, Tetris will do exactly that: It will become an international, age-defying phenomenon, rocketing the sales of especially Nintendo’s break-through handheld hardware (i.e., the GameBoy) into the millions. The filmmakers just ask us in the audience to forget that fact as much as we can while watching the story….
This approach is, of course, not a new technique: Dramatizing the events behind an outcome we participants in the common culture know well is a method that has produced cultural and technical milestones like:
Chariots of Fire (Hudson [dir.] & Welland [wri.], 1981),
The Imitation Game (Tyldum [dir.] & Moore [wri.], 2014),
The King’s Speech (Hooper [dir.] & Seidler [wri.], 2010),
The Two Popes (Meirelles [dir.] & McCarten [wri.], 2019),
Spotlight (McCarthy [dir./wri.] & Singer [wri.], 2015),
Reversal of Fortune (Schroeder [dir.] & Kazan [wri.], 1990),
Erin Brockovich (Soderbergh [dir.] & Grant [wri.], 2000), and
The Social Network (Fincher [dir.] & Sorkin [wri.], 2010) —
to name just a few examples. The method works especially well, whenever the real events that transpired behind the headlines audiences remember involve implausible, dangerous, or simply unlikely acts, moments that challenge experience-given expectations of what’s common and what’s rare. The last three films in my list of examples fit this niche especially well. And so coincidentally does Tetris: With real events that transform an otherwise commonplace business transaction into a Cold War heist on the order of Argo (Affleck [dir.] & Terrio [wri.], 2012), Tetris has all the right materials (i.e., foundation and approach) to make itself a riveting and acclaimed drama, like any of those I’ve mentioned. I’ve no doubt that Egerton, an actor who probably took it hardest of anyone that his performance in the Elton John biopic Rocketman (Fletcher [dir.] & Hall [wri.], 2019) did not earn him his first Oscar nomination, likely signed onto this new project for that very potential. The problem is, readers, that having the right materials is not enough; the problem is, the right assembly is also required.
Tetris is a high-stakes, high-drama heist film, tapping into Cold War anxieties and obstacles as much as drawing on one visionary for fuel to power its engine. Thus as much a cultural descendant of Bridge of Spies (Spielberg [dir.], Charman, Coen, & Coen [wri.], 2015) and The Imitation Game as a relative of video game docu-histories like The Rise of Jumpman (DPadGamer, 2021), Tetris the film is a potluck dinner of interesting ideas, but one that collectively lacks the finesse of a master chef to somehow magically tie all those ideas together. Indeed, unlike its nearest cultural relatives The Playlist (Spurrier & Franklin [creators], 2022; about the history of Spotify) and Bridge of Spies, which rest and run on singular approaches, Tetris lacks a deep structure beyond the interstitial 8-bit chapter cards that lend the film its formal outline. The missing deep structure would blend together the sweat of the ideas spanning all corners of the piece and help the final story avoid the abrupt tone shifts and pivots in focus that jar rather than reïnvigorate the audience.
Is the film fun? Sure. Will other (especially millennial) gamer nerds like it? Probably. Is it worth your time as an entry into our cultural landscape? Meh.
Boohoo for Egerton: He can’t seem to get a real win.
Temperature check
Tepid
Succession (Final Season Premiere)
HBOMax • Drama • “I drink your milkshake.”
Synopsis
Bested yet again by their billionaire father, three adult siblings wrestle over strategy to turn the tide on their intrafamilial and corporate positions.
My take
Note: This take was written after viewing the premiere two episodes.
Jesse Armstrong’s hybrid adaptation of Harvey and Goldman’s (1968) The Lion in Winter and the actual lives of the Murdoch family (see Shastry & Profiloski’s [2022] The Murdochs: Empire of Influence for more on this connection) enters its fourth and final season with more a whimper than a roar. The once startling intrafamilial drama is showing clears signs of its age, as the internal conflicts motivating the drama and this final season’s arch come across hackneyed and dull in context of and comparison with the existing history of conflicts already on past seasons. Perhaps I’m just jaded now, but I’m just bored. What I can tell are clearly meant to be poignant and devastating twists in the storytelling are, to any attentive viewer, the predictable writhings of an only marginally inventive writers’ room, laboring under the misapprehension that compounding deception passes for taut adventurous narration. Honestly, readers, it’s making me ask, ‘What’s this all for anyway?’ I almost don’t even care anymore who succeeds Logan Roy as CEO of Waystar RoyCo. And to have such sentiments after one of the most engaging season finales on contemporary television last season, one sick with mounting ire, vengeance, and polite betrayal, tells me both how high a standard the show has set for itself and how sad I am that it is currently nowhere near to clearing it.
While I remain hopeful, readers, that the rest of this once brilliant show recovers from this humdrum beginning, I can’t say I have the confidence that tuning in each week will allow us more than a milquetoast end to an otherwise bold drama.
P.S. After writing this review but before publishing it, I saw this past week’s most recent episode, the third in the season, and was rapt the entire time. I commented to my watching partner here, “They really needed that.” Are more good things to come? Fingers are crossed, readers. However, my ultimate review here has not changed. The best I can say is:
Temperature check
Cold (but brewing?)
80 for Brady (2023)
Paramount+ • Comedy • Belles & Balls
Synopsis
An octogenarian corrals her three closest friends into a last-minute trip to support their favorite sportsman and his team at the 51st Super Bowl.
My take
What an uncommon joy to see, and what a smart production to make: a film starring three of our best 75+-year-old American actresses in a mainstream sports-centered drama-comedy! Related (but only distantly) to the documentary Tea with the Dames (Michell, 2018), which featured these American actresses’ British counterparts at their leisure, as well as to the canon of American football films (e.g., Rudy [Anspaugh, dir., & Pizza, wri., 1993], Any Given Sunday [Stone, dir./wri., & Logan, wri., 1999]), 80 for Brady is both the respectable women’s story and the feel-good sports fanatics’ release audiences love to see — only now in one package — and it is genuinely entertaining!
If nothing else, this entertainment is the exact kind of mass appealing production studios should be investing in:
capitalizing on the uncommon union of two otherwise very distinct audiences (who normally wouldn’t even consider seeing each other’s films);
actively employing — not to mention uniquely bringing together for an ensemble piece — some of our greatest continuing senior talent, who’ve delighted critics and audiences for decades but would otherwise be relegated these days to supporting roles in altogether younger films; and
(perhaps because two distinct audiences are meeting) finding a comfortable, Saturday-afternoon level of balance between hijinks and competent storytelling to entertain but not quite pander.
80 for Brady is no great work of cinema, readers, but it is a milestone work of cinema in its production; and for that reason and for its seriously amazing cast it deserves a good note.
Temperature check
Tepid
Schmigadoon! (Season 2 Premiere)
Apple TV+ • Musical • Cicero! Lipschitz!
Synopsis
Troubled by fertility issues, a married couple attempts to return to a musical town where they previously worked through a romantic conflict.
My take
This, readers — THIS is how you return for a second season.
The daffy but endearing first season of Schmigadoon! was a gamble for Apple TV+. A serial musical comedy hadn’t really succeeded on television since Glee (Murphy, Falchuk, & Brennan [creators], 2009-2015) — and even then, not really, right? So, I was thrilled that the relatively new streaming service found enough momentum in this tiny show-that-could to renew it for a second season — though the question of where the show would or even could go after its first season’s ending loomed.
Now, nearly two years later, we’re finally seeing what the writers came up with, and I am thrilled to say that the wait has been worthwhile. I mean, what a smart evolution of the concept, to not only update the core struggle of the central characters but also update the generation of musical theater from which the show draws its inspiration, melodies, and central themes! No longer the bright-eyed, pleated-dress era of the 1940s and 1950s but now the shadow-eyed, tattered-skirt era of the late 1960s and 1970s, the gritty and passionate tone shift moves forward the argument of the show just as the the original composers and lyricists of the period moved forward the actual musical theater, from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Kander and Ebb. (Think “Bells and Whistles” instead of “Corn Puddin’!") And it’s fun to see the central characters respond differently to this era, just as some members of the real theater audiences of the time no doubt did.
And, even with all that baseline goodness, it’s still really the performances that uplift the material into its best form. In this week’s most recent episode, Jane Krakowski’s “Bells and Whistles” is nothing short of astounding, and I have fully applauded aloud at home by myself after several other songs this season.
While of course it helps to know the original material that this new season so clearly references, no prior experience here is needed to have a good time. Bravissimo to everyone behind Schmigadoon! Season 2. I can’t wait for Season 3!
Temperature check
Hot!
Great Expectations (2023; Series Premiere)
Hulu • Drama • Rude Awakenings
Synopsis
A working-class boy profits but suffers under the tutelage of a series of wealthy but cruel mentors.
My take
Oscar winner and Rich Pick Olivia Colman haunts the screen in this new serial adaptation of the Dickens classic, about a young boy who both because of and despite his own merits and failings becomes acculturated to a life well outside poverty in 19th-century England.
Like previous literary adaptations FX has distributed via Hulu (esp., Murphy and Knight’s [2018] A Christmas Carol), this Great Expectations (also adapted for the screen by Steven Knight) is Gothic in flair. Cinematography by chiaroscuro, founded on the sooty gray tones and dim cobwebbed corridors of early-industrial London and its suburbs, brings forward the grime and the hardship of Dickens’ tale and consequently backgrounds the wonder and the call to fortune its protagonist partially lucks into hearing. The result is visually interesting and could make the series as special as A Christmas Carol was, except that the two performances at the center of the series so far — namely, Fionn Whitehead’s as the naïvely adult Pip and Shalom Brune-Franklin’s as his tutor and love interest, Estella — fall flat amidst their surroundings. Whereas Guy Pearce enriched the role of Ebenezer Scrooge and A Christmas Carol as a consequence, Whitehead and Brune-Franklin don’t add much more than fumbling uncertainty to their portrayals of these two entwined but not necessary enamored young people.
At least we can depend on Colman as Miss Havisham, as well as Ashley Thomas as a gravelly Mr. Jaggers, to inject jolts of formidable magnitude into the storyline. For them at least, I’ll stay tuned.
Temperature check
Cold
Ted Lasso (Season 3 Premiere)
Apple TV+ • Comedy • Frenemies
Synopsis
Growth begets competition in a tight-knit professional football circle.
My take
“Everyone’s favorite” expat. football coach returns for his third season, and we find him there red-faced and green-stomached from the emotional doldrums that plagued his last season. Ever the optimist, however, he reliably pushes all that ‘bother’ to the rear and chooses to focus, instead, on growing everyone around him: his family, his colleagues, his team, and this season even his antagonists.
Is this charm, you ask? No, I answer.
While this quintessentially Lasso-like behavior does come garnished with folksy affectations and light humor, it is (in my opinion) forestalling the series from truly moving forward and is therefore not charming but reducing: reducing the series’ value both as a cultural entry and as an entertainment. I mean, how much longer can we tolerate a main character whose obsession with helping others comes with the express cost of never maintaining himself? How long can we be expected to watch a man who perpetually advises others on the wisdom of introspection consistently turn around and avoid that same work himself? Jaunts and japes seem hardly a long-term substitute. And, for that matter, how many times can we relisten to new variations on old motivational speeches given in locker rooms and/or before big games? I’m thinking, not much longer, readers.
Has the Lasso worn thin? Well, I’m not sure, but it has certainly frayed.
Temperature check
Tepid
Yellowjackets (Season 2 Premiere)
Showtime • Drama • Tooth and Nail
Synopsis
Connected by a shared tragedy, several women contend with their own vices and the on-going aftermath of grim adolescent choices.
My take
The Critics’ Choice Association awarded Melanie Lynskey its award for Best Actress in a Drama Series last year, for her performance in Showtime’s break-through drama, Yellowjackets. A series ultimately about the need for survival (in all its shapes and forms), the series’ first season merged aspects of:
Lost (Lieber, Abrams, & Lindelof [creators], 2004-2010),
Euphoria (Levinson [creator], 2019-Present),
Breaking Bad (Gilligan [creator], 2008-2013), and
The L Word (Chain, Abbot, & Greenberg [creators], 2004-2009)
to explore trauma, human limits, and being an outsider as extensions of the canonical story of adolescence. Buoyed by generally good performances from its core cast, including especially Christina Ricci in support, the season was a success and did leave me with a distinct craving for more — which is always a sign of quality in my book.
However, that first season concluded more than a full year before this second season premiered, and like a person trying to speak a foreign language again a year after an immersive trip abroad I find myself and the show fumbling a bit to reörient ourselves. While unlike Succession’s fumbling this season, Yellowjackets’ isn’t seemingly due to a lack of ideas on how to properly advance the plot; no, instead, Yellowjackets’ may be due to a lack of understanding of how to advance the plot meaningfully while reïntroducing the audience and the actors to the plot’s core truths. This issue isn’t terminal; a good resurgence after an awkward reïntroduction could still mean a spectacular season, especially since the main “will they? won’t they?” question about the show’s premise was wisely answered in this season’s second episode. That said, only time will tell.
For now, we’ll sit tight. O, hey, it’s Elijah Wood.
Temperature check
Tepid
Perry Mason (Season 2 Premiere)
HBOMax • Drama • Flint & Tinder
Synopsis
Scarred by the aftermath of a criminal defense trial, a reluctantly collaborative detective-turned-lawyer considers whether to stay within civil law.
My take
Yawn. Unnecessarily slow pacing befits a prequel show like this one, I suppose, but why do we need to stick around to watch it, readers? All surface-level storytelling, with a predictable main plot line, Perry Mason Season 2 lacks the dynamics that made its first season attractive and chooses instead to posture like an old litigant’s Mad Men (Weiner [creator], 2007-2015). The smoke is in your eyes, show runners, I think, Juliet Rylance as Della Street excepted.
Temperature check
Cold
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Final Season Premiere)
Amazon Prime • Comedy • Legacy
Synopsis
Glimpses of the future paint a convergent, if ambivalently successful, path forward for a 1960s’ Manhattanite comedienne and her family.
My take
It’s a sad, albeit familiar, truth that series audiences love in their first or even second seasons wane in appreciation and popularity (sometimes dramatically) as they age into seasons beyond; it’s only the truly exceptional shows, that audiences continue to love right through their ultimate episodes. So, color me unsurprised that what little chatter I’ve heard about the current and most recent seasons of Amazon Prime’s once hit TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has fallen flat on the show as one seemingly “out of ideas” or otherwise now relatively lackluster.
I, however, wholeheartedly disagree. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel continues to be the sharpest, wittiest show on television — even its fifth and now final season — and never fails to delight me with its comic words and situations. Critiques I could otherwise lob at such a show — e.g., its comic contrivances strain credulity, its jokes repeat and grow tired, it’s breaking its plot in vainglorious attempts at laughs — all ring untrue. Each season the characters grow and change in ways that make sense for their identities and histories, the comedy continues to feel fresh and new because it must diegetically feel that way (for a stand-up comic who must continually invent new material or else lose an audience and a career), and the tightly designed neuroses and peculiarities of the characters still play well off each other as demonstrations of the inherent comedy and tragedy of life. It’s all just very well structured and coördinated.
The one objection I need to muster here questions the sudden cast change in this otherwise strong series’ final lap around the sun: namely — spoiler alert here forward — why is Stephanie Hsu leaving the cast so abruptly? Last we saw her character, Mei, she was pregnant, accepting Joel’s marriage proposal, and ready to set down a life in New York City with the Maisel family. Now, in episode 1(!) of this season, Mei is suddenly hightailing it out of not just the engagement and New York City but also her pregnancy?! If any move in the writing of this show were ever suspect, it’d be this one, hands down. Series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino denies that Hsu’s other commitments (e.g., the awards campaign of Everything Everywhere All at Once; Lee & Scheinert, 2022) kept her from being able to participate fully in the filming of this last season, Ausiello at TVLine reports; but I'm not sure that I buy that story…. That said, I suppose that we’ll never really know what the real story here truly was, and if there were any acrimony between Hsu and the rest of the Maisel cast and crew it might very well be on either side. I’m just disappointed that it cost us and the series the momentum it had worked all last season to build. Sigh. My compliments, however, to the writers, who’ve figured out how to rip off the band-aid without further damaging what’s underneath.
Temperature check
Hot
Retrospective
Notting Hill (1999)
Netflix • Romantic Comedy • The Taming of the Shrew
Synopsis
The meek owner of a travel book shop clumsily romances a spoiled American actress in and around London.
My take
Alright, call me a sentimentalist, reader, but I enjoy revisiting once popular romantic comedies. However, I do, not because I’m deeply moved by the plotlines or feel emotionally fulfilled by the entanglements; no, I enjoy revisiting them as capsules of the zeitgeist during the periods in which they were made. Really, nothing is a better depiction of the fine social and romantic rituals and expectations of a time than a mainstream romantic comedy.
Notting Hill is no exception. Reeking of a time when what passed for mainstream romance still prioritized the average straight man’s fantasy of becoming the object of a famously attractive celebrity’s affection, the film is a perfect register of what is now a bygone age’s mores. If you haven’t seen Notting Hill (ever or, at least, in a while), let me explain what I mean:
Julia Roberts’ character is a brat, snickering at Hugh Grant’s character’s parochial instincts and values but nevertheless pathologically unwilling to admit to her own vicious habits and behaviors — and vicious they are. Basking in the glow of her expected and obtained celebration by nearly everyone she meets, she rides high on her own supply the entire movie, and uses it as if it were an automatic excuse to treat others as casually and meanly as she likes. Her only personally redemptive qualities are her dinner-table tact and heavily practiced “charm,” which she exercises whenever she feels she needs to be on her best behavior (or, at least, be the adored image in front of her real self). No one ever holds her accountable either way, not least because she’d hardly tolerate their presences if they ever tried. Seriously, what an awful woman!
Hugh Grant’s character, on the other hand, is, as described by nearly everyone in his life, hopelessly humdrum. Even he himself says he’d rather be reading at home than almost anywhere with other people. Once quite handsome and now just “floppy,” the character bumbles about and, almost despite his own incapacity — or is it because of it? — manages to catch the attention of someone who likely is just intrigued by how everyday normal he treats her. Living with a roommate who is the comic pinnacle of fecklessness and ‘single male’ grime, he’s made only by contrast against his even more pathetic peers to seem noble and charming. He’s the bookish everyman’s avatar.
That these two characters become awkwardly tied to one another is a profound miracle, and I suppose that’s the whole wonder of the plot. A bit like Grant’s character’s subplot (though gender-swapped) in Love Actually (Curtis, 2003), a film whose theme and content Notting Hill essentially predicts, the relationship Grant’s and Roberts’ characters develop capitalizes on its unlikelihood, by proposing to audiences that such unlikely romances could be theirs any day. They just need to look around for the opportunities. “O, if I could only have a fickle and cowardly celebrity of my own!”
Hint: I was not buying what Notting Hill was selling.
Leave this one in the past, readers. Jerry Maguire (Crowe, 1996) did it first and did it better.
Temperature check
Cold (Very)
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This hot tea was quite BEEFy 🔥