Mike Hale

“The Boys” is not pitched at the feverish level of “Preacher,” in terms of either mayhem or dark comic style — its showrunner, Eric Kripke, is the maker of network series like “Supernatural” and “Timeless,” and the eight-episode “Boys” is like a high-end, more thoughtfully assembled, slightly bloodier and sexier version of one of those conventional shows. (“Preacher” is overseen by Sam Catlin, whose previous writing and producing experience includes “Breaking Bad.”)

“The Boys” is also a little more of a known quantity because it’s a superhero show. That it’s an anti-superhero show — in which the costumed crime fighters are the bad guys, arrogant and corporatized and heedless of collateral damage to innocent humans, and the Boys of the title are a motley, disreputable bunch who take them on — doesn’t change the basic equation. The visual takeaway is still people in tights who can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes, the wrinkle being that we’re rooting for the guy fighting back with his wits and a crowbar.

All of that said, the series is quite enjoyable, particularly in a fast and clever first episode (written by Kripke and directed by Dan Trachtenberg) that introduces us to the show’s world — marginally exaggerated from our own — and gives the show’s real hero, the distinctly non-superpowered electronics salesman Hughie (Jack Quaid), a reason to hate the supes. In a judiciously horrifying scene, we witness the accidental obliteration of Hughie’s fiancee by an out-of-control Flash-like character, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), who’s a member of the Seven, America’s premiere superhero team.

Branded and managed by Vought, an evil corporation occupying a futuristic tower not far from the Empire State Building, the Seven are led by a patriotic blond Übermensch, Homelander (played with a potently quiet creepiness by Antony Starr of “Banshee”). He is Superman gone sour, and the show merrily frames the Seven as exemplars of American privilege, patriarchy and fraudulent celebrity culture. Homelander’s wholesome facade hides a serial liar and stalker, while aquatic hero the Deep (Chace Crawford) is a walking #MeToo nightmare. Vought covers up their excesses while selling their services to crime-ridden cities and lobbying to have them made responsible for national defense.

Hughie, a former fan boy now enraged and suffering from post-superhero stress, is recruited in a clandestine attempt to bring down the Seven by a bruiser named Billy Butcher (an amusing Karl Urban), who has his own reasons to want them stopped or dead. More allies gradually join their vendetta, and the show loses some of its spark over subsequent episodes in part because of the unwieldy cast that needs to be introduced and kept busy — the Seven (including Erin Moriarty as the new member, an innocent from Des Moines, Iowa), plus five Boys, plus Elisabeth Shue as a Vought executive, Simon Pegg as Hughie’s dad and Jennifer Esposito as a CIA agent who has a past with Butcher. It’s a lot of bodies to pack into eight episodes.

Quaid, who took an arrow as Marvel in “The Hunger Games” (and is the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid), gives a charming, sympathetic performance as the overwhelmed but resilient Hughie, and you’re glad when he’s on screen. And overall, the architecture of Ennis’ story — a lighter, less apocalyptic take on the kind of superhero deconstruction Alan Moore did in “Miracleman” and “Watchmen” — is interesting enough, and executed with enough panache, to pull you along. Putting the onus on Hughie to choose a true, human-scaled heroism isn’t a new idea, but it still has an emotional tug.

And the notion that the world needs to be saved from its superheros has another sneaky resonance: Vought, with its stable of 200 costumed heroes, its theme parks and film franchises (and a management Butcher calls “empty suits with Cornell degrees”), resembles nothing so much as the comics leviathans Marvel and DC. (The “Boys” comic book was first published, and then dropped, by a DC imprint.) When Hughie learns the truth about the Seven, he’s outgrowing the comic books of his youth — the kind of heroes DC and Marvel sell. “The Boys,” meanwhile, is offering the kind of smart, easygoing pleasure that most of the Marvel Netflix shows, its closest analogues, didn’t quite reach.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/television/review-the-boys-amazon-prime.html" id="711ae4cb-994c-395a-aa82-2e5d5a6f0430">The New York Times</a>.

The team of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (producers) and Garth Ennis (comics writer) has given us AMC’s “Preacher,” the most inventive, audacious and purely entertaining comics-based series of the past few years. With “Preacher” on the way out — its final season begins Aug. 4 — the three are getting right back in the game, with a new show based on an Ennis comic, “The Boys,” coming to Amazon Prime Video on Friday.

Review: 'The Boys' Deconstructs the Superhero, With a Light Touch

The writers, producers and performers Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin like to cover their comedic bets. On Wednesday, Comedy Central is premiering “South Side,” their amiable new sitcom set in the working-class Chicago neighborhood of Englewood. But wait, there’s more: The following Wednesday, IFC is premiering “Sherman’s Showcase,” their high-concept vaudeville act that takes the form of a tribute to a fictional variety show at the intersection of “Soul Train,” “Laugh-In” and late-night cable-access.

While the two shows look nothing like each other, there are some constants in the Riddle-and-Salahuddin approach. Their humor, while clever and with a satirical edge, is embracing and to a large degree universal — they’re more interested in pointing out foibles than in retailing grievances (particularly in “South Side”).

Complementing that stance is a worldview that feels thoroughly nostalgic. “South Side,” about a pair of best friends and recent community-college graduates with aspirations — the 10-episode season largely charts their efforts to find more gainful employment than their jobs as furniture repossessors — is set in the present day of mint lattes and bitcoin. But its rhythms and relationships are thoroughly traditional, carrying on a sitcom legacy running from “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times” through Aaron McGruder’s “Black Jesus” to “Rel,” the Lil Rel Howery series also set on Chicago’s South Side. (Howery has a supporting role in “South Side” as a fellow furniture-store employee and abrasive antagonist to the easygoing heroes.)

“Sherman’s Showcase,” meanwhile, is a pure jolt of stylized nostalgia, from its affectionate sendups of soul, R&amp;B; and hip-hop to its candy-colored sets with their abstract cutouts, traversed by roller-skating dancers. “American culture peaked in 1973,” proclaims the host of the show within the show, Sherman McDaniel (Salahuddin). “Anything after that is a [expletive] lie.”

The deeper tie between the two shows, though, may be Riddle and Salahuddin’s sketch-comedy sensibility. College friends and writing partners, they worked together for three years on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” That experience directly informs “Sherman’s Showcase,” but it can also be seen in “South Side,” whose scenes and episodes don’t build (at least not in any intricate or surprising way) but skip along from joke to joke, verbally and visually.

Luckily, the jokes come along quickly and are mostly pretty good. And they’re held together by a consistent theme: While the central characters Simon and Kareem (Sultan Salahuddin, Bashir’s brother, and Kareme Young) and the other residents of Englewood constantly look for ways to make some extra cash, they are in turn victimized by more powerful economic forces, in a round robin of low-level exploitation.

Simon and Kareem may be taken advantage of in a series of dicey and comically unlikely ventures, from dealing black-market Viagra to cryptocurrency speculation. But their day jobs are with the rapacious Rent-T-Own, managed by Kareem’s brother, Q (played by Kareme Young’s twin, Quincy), and they’re not overly sentimental about taking back the television sets and Xboxes that their neighbors are being overcharged for. It’s left to the local gangster, Shaw (LaRoyce Hawkins), to point out that they’re part of the problem: “When you was a little homey, did you always dream of harassing black people for their appliances?”

Sultan Salahuddin, a comedian who’s performed with the Upright Citizens Brigade, and Kareme Young are not seasoned actors, and their work in “South Side” is serviceable. But the scripts don’t demand much beyond fully inhabiting their hopeful, scrambling characters. Salahuddin has a nice touch with melancholic moments, like a scene in which Simon is fired from his dream job (clerk at a cable-television provider) after four hours and instead of getting angry, shrugs his shoulders and takes his children to a space-travel exhibit.

And the show finds consistently funny ways to subvert the clichés of the poor-urban-neighborhood narrative, in both its earnest and menacing incarnations. When the opportunistic cop played by Chandra Russell (Bashir Salahuddin’s wife) buys a brownstone on the cheap, she finds herself saddled with a deadbeat tenant who was a Chicago civil-rights heroine and trades on her status to skip the rent. “I am all paid up,” she declares, adding that her new landlord is “a little legal-pad-colored heifer.”

Where “South Side” feels like a family production, “Sherman’s Showcase” is starrier, with a brightness and energy to match. It boasts John Legend, playing himself as the host of the mock retrospective (it’s an expansion of the Helen Mirren role from “Documentary Now,” a clear influence on the series), and cameos by a lineup of good-sport guest stars including Ray Parker Jr., Quincy Jones and several Wayans brothers.

The format, stretched across eight episodes, allows Riddle and Salahuddin to throw a lot of things against the wall, and they don’t all stick. Tiffany Haddish eating soup, presented as an example of a failed idea, is a failed idea, though a harmlessly brief one. And the metafictional elements, as the history of the fake show is traced across four decades toward a politically topical finale, can get tiresome. It may not hold your interest, but those with stamina can hang around for the bits that work, like a promo for Sherman’s CD compilation “Now That’s What I Call White Music,” or an advertisement in which two winsome children play a hip-hop version of Clue: “The haters. In the conservatory. With the Draco!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/arts/television/south-side-shermans-showcase-review.html" id="538c0640-0ec0-3997-a4fe-c40530c3954c">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

'South Side' and 'Sherman's Showcase': Two Flavors of Nostalgia

“Veronica Mars,” which ran for three seasons on UPN and CW from 2004 to 2007, has become the zombie of entertainment franchises: revived using Kickstarter for a 2014 feature film, and now revived again for an eight-episode fourth season on Hulu.

Season 4 was shock-released Friday, a week ahead of schedule, and like the film (also called “Veronica Mars”), it reunites the central cast, which has stuck with the story across 15 years. Kristen Bell is Veronica, the cynical daddy’s girl and tough California beach-town private eye, a cocktail of Nancy Drew and Sam Spade. Enrico Colantoni is Keith Mars, her wry father and mentor, banged up and fearing dementia after the brutal conclusion of the film. And Jason Dohring is back as Logan Echolls, her bad-boy boyfriend, now a naval intelligence officer whose absences on secret missions supply the relationship angst formerly fueled by teenage moodiness and violence.

These three and a number of regular supporting players, including the friends portrayed by Percy Daggs III, Francis Capra and Ryan Hansen, solve a mystery — who’s setting off bombs targeting spring breakers in the seedier sections of Neptune, the home base of Mars Investigations — while enacting the show’s familiar, and still entertaining, lightly comic spin on hard-boiled noir.

We’re not in high school anymore, though, and as Veronica agonizes over her future with Logan, frets about Keith’s health and bemoans the continuing gentrification of Neptune, her nostalgia for a simpler time may be paralleled by the viewer’s nostalgia for the immediate pleasures of the show’s splendid first season. Do we need more “Veronica Mars,” even if it continues to arrive in polished and pleasing packages?

Opening during Veronica’s junior year at Neptune High, the series originally stood out for its clever and literate writing and the superior performances of Bell, Colantoni and Dohring. (Rob Thomas, the show’s creator, still oversees it and wrote the new season’s first and last episodes.) It was perhaps even more unusual for the way it presented a teenage world, and a story hinging on teenage melodrama, from a wised-up, adult point of view and with a fully adult emotional sensibility.

The adult intelligence is still there, and Bell and Colantoni are still wonderful together, consistently nailing the old-Hollywood, tough-and-tender style the show demands and demonstrating seemingly effortless comic grace. But Thomas hasn’t found a really satisfactory replacement for the show’s loss of teen spirit; and the grown-up romantic travails of Veronica and Logan, a significant subplot in the new season, aren’t as compelling as their tempestuous high school amours.

It’s also a problem that the streaming-season model entails stretching a single mystery over close to eight hours. That’s new for “Veronica Mars” — the network seasons had long-arc mysteries, but they were broken up by lighter stand-alone cases over their 22 episodes. Thomas has put together a complicated caper in Season 4, with the bombings simultaneously investigated by Veronica and Keith, the hapless Neptune police, a group of true-crime nerds, a pair of Mexican cartel hit men and Matty, a young woman who evolves into Veronica’s protégée. (Played by Izabela Vidovic, Matty fills the vacuum left by Tina Majorino’s pugnacious Mac, the one central character who doesn’t return.) Some of the twists are clever, but in the eight-episode format the story’s implausibilities are more distracting. The seams show in a way that didn’t used to matter.

(There’s another more directly annoying consequence of the move to streaming: several obtrusive product placements for Hulu itself, including a scene in which Veronica and Logan settle in to binge the last show you can imagine them watching, the British costume drama “Harlots.”)

Still, whenever the love story starts to drag or the mystery gets irritatingly convoluted, and despite an abrupt (and seemingly convenient) late detour into tragedy, “Veronica Mars” finds ways to charm you. Bell’s sparkle — no one does pluckiness better, or funnier — and Colantoni’s utterly relaxed, jazzlike timing are givens. Old favorites like Daran Norris, Duane Daniels and especially Max Greenfield make their usual solid comic contributions. (The chemistry between Bell and Greenfield puts a spotlight on the show’s failure to grow Dohring’s character into an interesting adult.) The show has fun with its own history, as in a touching scene when Daggs’ Wallace, now a teacher, watches Matty extract information from a love-struck mark just like Veronica used to when he was her high-school accomplice.

The season also benefits from the addition of a pair of performers whose contrasting styles speak to the show’s blend of genres: Patton Oswalt, bringing his nervous screwball energy to the role of a pizza deliveryman and amateur sleuth, and J.K. Simmons, supplying noirish menace and cool as an aging ex-con and fixer who sees a soul mate in Keith. (Simmons and Colantoni’s scenes together constitute the season’s most satisfying romance.) Whether we needed another installment of “Veronica Mars” or not, there are more than enough reasons not to miss it now that it’s here.

Event Information:

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/arts/television/veronica-mars-review.html" id="6210681f-5860-3317-a5bc-63833f65da96">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

'Veronica Mars' and the One-Great-Season Debate

(There’s another more directly annoying consequence of the move to streaming: several obtrusive product placements for Hulu itself, including a scene in which Veronica and Keith settle in to binge the last show you can imagine them watching, the British costume drama “Harlots.”)

Like Gabriel Kaplan’s Gabe Kotter, Iglesias’ Gabe Iglesias is a dedicated public-school teacher assigned to a class of comic underachievers. The Brooklyn, New York, high school in “Kotter” was based on Kaplan’s alma mater, New Utrecht High; the Long Beach, California, school in “Mr. Iglesias” is based on Iglesias’ alma mater, Woodrow Wilson. The students are diverse (Italian and Jewish having counted as such for “Kotter” in the late 1970s). Both Gabes are dogged by a humorless administrator who targets their students. Iglesias even has his own Horshack, an excitable boy named Mikey Gutierrez (Fabrizio Guido), who at one point throws in an “Ooh, ooh” when asking a question.

And despite the radical changes you would expect after 40 years — in language, sexual frankness and political and cultural demonstrativeness — “Mr. Iglesias,” whose 10 episodes hit Netflix on Friday, is every bit the conventional multicamera sitcom that “Kotter” was. Take away the dating-app jokes, and the humor is, if anything, blander and more predictable, the jokes more obvious, the reaction shots more ubiquitous. The show glides along on the self-effacing charm of its star (who uses his stand-up moniker, Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias, in the credits), but it doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere.

Series like this operate off a set of assumptions, held in place to minimize or eliminate the possibility of surprising the audience. In “Mr. Iglesias,” the orthodoxy is up to date, as demonstrated by the summary of American history delivered by a showboating teacher’s pet: “Wiped out the indigenous people, oppressed the blacks, did some good stuff around World War II and now the sun is setting on our empire.”

Jabs at injustice and inequality are the show’s backbeat, and they’re not distinguished by their subtlety. When the boorish coach played by Christopher McDonald says that nothing brings a community together like “the common purpose of football,” Gabe responds, “The common purpose of hating people that are different than you works pretty well, too.”

So it’s counterintuitive when the writers resort to retrograde stereotypes to fill out the production around Gabe. The principal, Paula, while given some high-comic style by Sherri Shepherd, is a sharp-tongued, sex-obsessed cartoon. The coach is a Neanderthal caricature who can’t be made funny despite McDonald’s strenuous efforts. Gabe’s tightly wound antagonist, Carlos (played by Oscar Nuñez with his usual grace), is of unspecified sexuality but worships Gilbert and Sullivan and has a bichon frisé named Captain Tennille.

Of course there’s a structural reason for making Gabe’s colleagues, who also include his slacker buddy, Tony (Jacob Vargas), and Abby, a statuesque, risibly naive young white woman from South Dakota (Maggie Geha), so one-dimensional. Not only is Iglesias the star, but the storylines depend, time and again, on Gabe’s being the only teacher who truly believes in the students. (There’s one other instructor who’s given some dignity, the veteran Ray, played by Richard Gant, who years ago set the young Gabe on the right path. But he’s old, so he doesn’t count.)

Iglesias isn’t really an actor, but he’s had a lot of practice playing himself onstage, and he embodies Gabe’s sincerity and modesty in such a natural, unaffected way that he is almost egregiously likable. Vargas is also engaging as Tony, a gambling addict whose crush on Abby is a lawsuit waiting to happen, while Guido and Tucker Albrizzi stand out among the actors playing the students. (Cree Cicchino is fine as the crusading Marisol, but she’s mainly there to deliver righteous diatribes.)

“Mr. Iglesias” doesn’t consistently find ways to capitalize on the goodwill its performers build up, though. There’s an arc through the season in which Gabe readies his students to enter an annual academic decathlon (cue the rousing finale), but episode by episode the situations are evergreen: Will Gabe flunk the football star before the big game? Who will be most embarrassed at the talent show?

It also has a tendency to weasel out of the conflicts it sets up. The football player turns out to be covertly smart and just needs a little push. When Marisol protests the official use of “Latino,” arguing for “Latinx,” it’s interesting that Gabe replies, “You can’t just make up a word and force people to use it.” You want to see where that argument goes, but it just fades away, the way “Mr. Iglesias” is likely to fade from your memory.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/arts/television/review-mr-iglesias-netflix.html" id="1037c6f5-063b-3b4f-a00c-6aaff288d7ed">The New York Times</a>.

With his new series, “Mr. Iglesias,” arriving three months after the contentious cancellation of “One Day at a Time,” comedian Gabriel Iglesias will inevitably be seen as picking up the cause of Latino representation on Netflix. That’s a lot of pressure for someone who’s really just trying to remake “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

Review: Welcome back, sitcom high school

<h1>Fans of the emblematic submarine adventure “Das Boot,” an international hit in 1981 and a favorite of those who like their war movies claustrophobic and single-minded, may be alarmed by descriptions of the new “Das Boot” television series. This German-British production, washing up on Hulu on Monday, is a surf and turf proposition: Half the action takes place aboard another cramped U-boat, while half takes place ashore, among the Nazi occupiers and French collaborators and resisters of La Rochelle, France, where the boats are based.</h1>

Granted, you’d have to be pretty fearless to set eight hours of TV aboard a submarine, in the manner of Wolfgang Petersen’s film, which took place almost entirely within the confines of the ill-fated U-96. (To say nothing of future seasons; the new “Das Boot” has already been renewed.) On the evidence of this handsomely produced, surprisingly grisly and solemnly wacko show, though, the main benefit of opening up the story is gaining access to a whole new set of World War II clichés.

The eight-episode first season, drawn again from Lothar Günther-Buchheim’s 1973 novel “Das Boot” and also from a later book of his, “Die Festung,” was originally announced as a remake of the film but then repositioned as a sequel. The result is an odd hybrid: The maritime section of the story follows a different boat, U-612, that somehow keeps having misadventures — a strafing, a fall to the sea floor — that closely mirror those of U-96. Once again there’s a noble, strong-jawed captain (Rick Okon in the Jürgen Prochnow role) stuck with a zealous Nazi (August Wittgenstein) as first officer.

While U-612 zigs and zags around the Atlantic on a secret and highly improbable mission involving an American industrialist (Vincent Kartheiser) who has helped finance the German war machine, the real star of the series scurries around La Rochelle. Vicky Krieps, the Luxembourg actress who was the muse of Daniel Day Lewis’ dressmaker in “Phantom Thread,” here plays Simone Strasser, an Alsatian translator whose brother is aboard U-612. At first determined to prove her loyalty to the Germans, she falls in with a French resistance cell, not because of Nazi atrocities (whose existence she doubts) but for love and, in a nod to 21st-century sensibilities, female solidarity. (Nazi sailors on shore leave are a violent crowd.)

One noticeable effect of the four-decade gap since the film is the improvement in special effects, even on a TV budget — the scenes on the water, especially during battle, look immeasurably more lifelike. They’re also not as beholden to standard submarine-story jargon and images — less dashing up and down the passages, fewer references to “silent running” — though those repetitions were kind of the point of the film, and aficionados can be excused for wondering why a new “Das Boot” was necessary. (Fans of Petersen’s opus will also miss his eye for composition and lighting — the way he made tableaus of sailors watching dials and listening for ships look like supplicants in an old-master painting.)

The real, and perfectly natural, change is that the story has been expanded into a conventional modern TV production, with its international cast and its multiple intertwined plots to fill the many hours. (Episodes run 55 to 60 minutes, commercial-free.) There’s more to see, but it’s more diffuse, and the continual cutting between the land story and the sea story gins up the suspense while making individual scenes more perfunctory.

For three-plus episodes, those stories build in a reasonably interesting and plausible fashion, proficiently staged by Andreas Prochaska, director of the entire season. Hoffmann, the captain, deals with rising tensions on U-612 — he’s unfairly seen as a dilettante and a coward — while Strasser is gradually radicalized through her contact with a resistance leader who happens to be American (Lizzy Caplan). That character, with her wounds from the Spanish Civil War, is pretty familiar, as are the shrugging French cop (Thierry Fremont) and the courteous Gestapo agent (Tom Wlaschiha). But they inhabit a well-made and entertaining, if prosaic, period war story.

Then, about halfway through the season, both the land and sea tales take radical, sensationalistic twists. The one involving Strasser is romantic and not in any way implausible, but it pushes things in a melodramatic direction. The one involving Hoffmann is dire and seems highly — let’s say profoundly — unlikely for a German crew at the height of the war, two years before D-Day. (It’s also a strange dramatic choice in that it removes a central character from a long stretch of the season.) But the OMG factor is high, if that’s what you like.

The improbable Saturday-matinee challenges the show throws at its heroines and heroes work thematically — this “Das Boot,” like the original, is concerned with honor and courage; with who breaks down and who rises up. It’s an endurance contest for the viewer, too, but at least we’re not in a metal tube with 40 men and one toilet.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/arts/television/das-boot-review.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Rebooting 'Das Boot,' on land and sea

Granted, you’d have to be pretty fearless to set eight hours of TV aboard a submarine, in the manner of Wolfgang Petersen’s film, which took place almost entirely within the confines of the ill-fated U-96.

<h1>“Luther,” the loony British cop show in which Idris Elba has been starring over the last decade, is very hard to kill. It rises from the dead again Sunday on BBC America after four years. This season, the fifth, is a typically tidy four episodes — short arcs being advisable when you routinely suspend all the laws of logic, psychology and police procedure.</h1>

Neil Cross, who created the show and still writes it, has a gift for packaging the lurid and the preposterous into hypnotizing psychodrama that moves fast enough to keep you from thinking too hard. Detective Chief Inspector John Luther should have been fired or dead from the first episode back in 2010, but as Season 5 opens he’s still on the job, chasing a serial killer with a taste for mutilation while simultaneously avoiding a vendetta being carried out by an angry gangster.

The show lives off the tension between Cross’ grand-guignol theatrics — the latest killer wears not only a creepy Guy Fawkes mask but a halo of halogen lights, like a self-contained circus sideshow — and Elba’s immensely world-weary, endearing performance as Luther.

While the body count multiplies and the ethical violations compound themselves, Luther scurries around London like a harried parent, pulled this way by his boss, that way by the criminal who’s holding a colleague hostage and another way by the beautiful, jealous psychopath he just can’t quit. A paladin in a drab overcoat, he always answers the call and does what can, by the application of highly tortured reasoning, be called the right thing. “I’m not a cynic,” he says, during a rare moment of self-reflection. “That’s basically the problem.”

He’s a romantic who never quite gets to the romance, though he’s still dancing around it with the murderous, superheroically capable nutcase Alice Morgan, played by Ruth Wilson. This would be a spoiler if BBC America hadn’t put Wilson in the trailers. Supposedly drowned in a previous season, Alice is reborn, like the show itself, and Wilson once again uses Alice’s jealousy and general impatience to inject some deadpan humor into the otherwise deadly serious proceedings.

Other old favorites return, including Paul McGann as Mark, the bereaved boyfriend of Luther’s dead ex-wife, not seen since Season 2. (He’s surprisingly OK with the return of Alice, considering she had him beat up by a gang of teenage girls in Season 1.) Chief among the new cast is Wunmi Mosaku (“The End of the ____ing World”) as Luther’s latest sergeant. She’s excellent in the essential role of the lonely voice of reason, projecting common sense and bemused distaste while reacting to lines like, “I found 39 needles embedded in the lower abdomen, the perineum and the testicles.”

The fifth season would probably be a difficult watch if you haven’t seen at least some of the previous four, available on Amazon Prime Video or, if it’s available to you, the BBC Player. The co-dependent relationship of Luther and Alice, with its improbable emotions and unanswerable questions — such as why he’s never just had her arrested — will be particularly mystifying. (The new season does some minor retconning to try to shore up this aspect of the story.)

And if you haven’t watched the show’s first episode, you won’t get the reference in the season’s big climax, a nakedly arbitrary and melodramatic touch that brings the series full circle and would seem to be Cross’ way of saying that’s all, folks. But there’s been talk of a movie, and with “Luther,” we know better than to ever say never. The dead will most likely rise again.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/arts/television/review-luther.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

The show lives off the tension between Cross’ grand-guignol theatrics — the latest killer wears not only a creepy Guy Fawkes mask but a halo of halogen lights, like a self-contained circus sideshow — and Elba’s immensely world-weary, endearing performance as Luther.

'Luther,' back from the dead

Jed Mercurio knows a thing or two about what television viewers in Britain like. His series “Bodyguard” was the highest rated show there (outside of the World Cup) in 2018. And now the fifth season of his “Line of Duty” is the highest rated British drama of 2019 so far.

In the case of “Line of Duty,” whose newest six-episode season comes to Acorn TV on Monday (joining the previous four), millions of viewers apparently like a cocktail of four parts forensics to one part action, with a twist of sensationalism and a splash of melodrama. It’s not good for you, but it will definitely give you a buzz.

In Season 5, the focus remains on three detectives in an anti-corruption unit (the British equivalent of internal affairs) in a grimy, unnamed city that resembles Birmingham. (The resemblance was strongest in Season 1, when the show was filmed there; subsequent seasons have been shot in Belfast, in Northern Ireland.)

Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) is walking again after being thrown down a flight of stairs in Season 4, and more than a little resentful that his partner, Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), got the promotion to inspector that was supposed to be his. (Given the show’s minimalist approach to humor, it’s very funny when he has to call her “Ma’am.”) Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) — their gaffer, or boss — is in a general state of decline, living in a hotel and dealing with a level of debt that’s particularly unhealthy for someone whose job is to ferret out cops on the take.

These three tackle a new case, and a new dirty cop, each season, but a distinguishing feature of “Line of Duty” is that all the cases run together in a single, continuing story. Someone in the top ranks of the police is in cahoots with organized crime, but he or she is always just out of reach, pulling the strings of the people Steve, Kate and Ted bring down. In the sort of cloak-and-dagger detail Mercurio favors, the mastermind is known only as H, a bit like the unseen Number One in “The Prisoner.”

With a sixth season ordered by the BBC, it’s not really a spoiler to say that the search will continue. In the meantime, this season’s antagonist is a rogue undercover cop — to say who plays him or her would be a giveaway — who acts as a kind of doppelgänger for our heroes, employing the tactics that they might wish to.

A primary strength of the series, beyond Mercurio’s ability to precisely blend his cop-show formulas, has been its gallery of charismatic, conflicted “bent” cops, played by an exceptionally able roster of actors: Lennie Harris, Keeley Hawes, Thandie Newton. If the new season falls slightly short of the show’s usual standard, it’s because neither this character nor the performance in the role is as interesting as its predecessors.

Otherwise, all the elements are in place. The show still centers on its signature interrogations, the equivalent of an action show’s fight scenes — long and static but intricately choreographed, fought through precise exchanges of haikulike jargon. (Regular viewers understand U.C.O., O.C.G. and D.I.R., and know that an officer can insist on being questioned by someone of superior rank.)

And once or twice an episode, the satisfyingly nerdy police-procedural grind will be punctuated by breakneck rushing about (“We’ll have to blue-light it!”) followed by some improbably violent or lurid action. That these situations are generally less baroque than in past seasons — fairly straightforward hijackings and shootouts, with no one being thrown from a hospital window or waking up to an amputated hand — will be either an improvement or disappointment depending on your taste.

“Line of Duty” works through a careful balancing act — Mercurio can overplay the tension, and get away with a high degree of ambient implausibility (how many times can Kate go undercover in one medium-sized city?), as long as he underplays the longer sequences of investigation and the dips into the cops’ private lives. It’s similar to Dick Wolf’s “Law &amp; Order” formula, and it makes “Line of Duty” a better show than the more highly rated “Bodyguard,” where Mercurio leaned heavily into melodrama.

The key underplayer is Compston as the combative Steve, the show’s moral center between the more pragmatic Kate and the more blustery, self-righteous Ted. Responding to station-house shootouts and sinister conspiracies with a raised eyebrow and a tight frown, he’s the beacon of sanity who allows us to enjoy the craziness guilt-free.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/arts/television/review-line-of-duty.html" id="7f20d07d-ee2c-3941-a15c-514c003afa65">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Good Cop, Bad Cop, Crazy Cop in 'Line of Duty'

That the 100 minutes of “State of the Union” — which spool out over two weeks on SundanceTV or one week on Sundance Now and other digital platforms beginning Monday — are a bit of a bagatelle, a minor project for all involved, doesn’t make them any less enjoyable.

Hornby’s story is a lightly stinging comedy about a marriage that’s threatening to go off the rails. Pike and O’Dowd play Louisa and Tom, who prepare for their weekly couples therapy by meeting in a London pub for a quick drink and not quite 10 minutes of hyperarticulate verbal jousting.

The series consists of these conversations, plus, in most cases, the couple’s walk across the street to the office of their counselor, whose given name, Kenyon, unsettles them. We never see inside her office, but often we hear Louisa and Tom discussing the previous week’s session. Their therapy appears to consist mostly of complaints and recriminations, while the real work of repairing their relationship takes place at the pub.

There they get at the central issues — Louisa’s infidelity, spurred by Tom’s apparent loss of interest in sex, both aggravated by his failure to find work as a music critic — by talking around them in elaborate circles and branching off in digressions that can be hopefully nostalgic or barbed and passive-aggressive. Their favorite ploy is analogy, and they compare facets of their relationship to diseases (Louisa is a gerontologist), the inner workings of a computer, Brexit, prison, peace negotiations and running: “Our sexual relationship is Usain Bolt with a groin injury.”

Frears does a great job of moving characters and cameras around to keep the single-set pub scenes looking fresh, and no two strolls across the street look the same; a scene in which Tom flees their appointment at the last minute is a small marvel of perspective. But “State of the Union” is nearly all talk, and the drama, if there’s going to be any, is in the serve and volley of the conversation.

Hornby isn’t helped here by the short format — he can’t build a rhythm the way he could in a film or a 30- or 60-minute episode, and not every 10-minute sketch is as sharp or coherent as you’d like. The ones that work best tend to be the ones that are more relaxed and easily humorous, and don’t try as hard to be brilliant, like the sixth, in which Louisa and Tom imagine what each other’s future partners might be like.

But even when the writing feels a little vague or forced, Pike and O’Dowd make the scenes work. Louisa and Tom need to figure out how to stop being bored with each other, and while the series is structured to keep us in suspense about the outcome, it’s hard to be pessimistic, because both performances are so expressive, aware and alive. Who could be bored?

We can see why Tom, a narcissistic pop-culture savant similar to O’Dowd’s character in “Juliet, Naked” (adapted from a Hornby novel), and the brusque, superior Louisa were attracted to each other. But we also see why they’re an imperfect match, and how they can miss each other’s cues even as they’re making progress — how they listen to each other except when they don’t. When Louisa tells Tom that she didn’t have any orgasms during her brief affair, he’s so pleased that he doesn’t register her addendum — that all she got was “warmth and solace” — and Pike’s face captures, in just a glance, all the disappointment she’s felt and will probably continue to feel.

It’s a reflex, faced with a 100-minute series directed by an accomplished feature filmmaker, to compare “State of the Union” to a movie. But the more apt comparison is probably to the theater — a play done as a series of short scenes, albeit one that calls to mind the work of screenwriters like Woody Allen and Preston Sturges, a favorite of Tom’s. In any case, a single sitting might be the best way to watch it, by saving it up on the DVR or waiting until it’s all online. No reason to wait 24 hours to see what Pike and O’Dowd will do next.

Additional Information:

New episodes every weekday, starting Monday on Sundance; streaming on Sundance Now.

This article originally appeared in <a id="f3160808-d696-3dee-adbe-6052b768516c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/arts/television/review-can-this-marriage-be-saved-at-the-local-pub.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Can this marriage be saved (at the local pub)?

What’s new about the series “State of the Union” is its 10-minute episodes. What’s interesting about it is its formidable concentration of talent: writer Nick Hornby, director Stephen Frears and actors Rosamund Pike and Chris O’Dowd. There are TV shows with more famous names in the credits, but it’s hard to think of a cast and crew with greater potential.

“Chernobyl,” a five-part miniseries starting Monday on HBO (in coproduction with British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism.

Of course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie.

Mazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks.

From there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3.

Mazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the show trial of the plant’s supervisors as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama.

Looking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion.

Legasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a backroom by the KGB.

The transformation of Legasov into a daring whistleblower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life.

The biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat and supervised its evacuation?)

In the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes.

At a time when the documentary miniseries is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html" id="735a8f79-012a-3c20-a36a-6b614177ad5a">The New York Times</a>.

How do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing.

Review: 'Chernobyl,' the Disaster Movie

Liz Feldman, who created the show, has been writing and performing comedy for more than half of her 41 years, and she’s demonstrated some real flexibility. She was a writer for Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show and for “Blue Collar TV,” which starred red-state favorites like Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. She wrote for conventional sitcoms like “2 Broke Girls” and “Hot in Cleveland” while hosting her own “gay-mazing” YouTube series, “This Just Out,” from her kitchen table.

Nothing she had done before, though, resembled the kind of up-to-the-minute streaming dramedy that “Dead to Me” wants to be. And while its 10 half-hour episodes have a lot of the requisite look and feel — the enervated, dolorous mood and rhythms; the mysteries within mysteries; the handsomely filmed Southern California locations — the show harks back to Feldman’s roots. At heart it’s a traditional odd-couple sitcom, albeit one that’s heavy on situation and light on comedy.

Applegate plays Jen, whose husband was killed by a hit-and-run driver, and Cardellini plays Judy, whose fiancé died of a heart attack. Jen is angry and cynical and hard-edged, Judy is rueful and apologetic and twee, and we know where that’s going. Jen will toughen up Judy and Judy will soften up Jen, an exchange of services made easier by the unlikely twist of Judy’s moving into Jen’s guesthouse.

Hundreds of episodes have been built around less. Short-season streaming shows don’t work that way, though, so Feldman counterpoints the comedy of female friendship with the tragedy of male condescension and predation, and sets it all within the framework of a murder mystery, or at least a manslaughter mystery.

As she makes the rounds of Orange County’s beach towns selling real estate, Jen searches for the car that mowed down her husband. Judy, meanwhile, has big secrets, which are doled out in flashbacks throughout the season. The revelations about her past are both mildly surprising and, in the way they stretch out the plot and inject conflict into her and Jen’s relationship, entirely predictable.

There’s some ingenuity in the ways Feldman works out the story’s complications. There’s craftsmanship in the details, like a running motif of Judy’s continually building up to confessions that turn out not to be the confession we’re anticipating. And there are moments when the comic situations click, mostly involving supporting characters like the earnest pastor and grief counselor played by Keong Sim or the casserole-bearing neighbor played by Suzy Nakamura.

But at the heart of the story, things don’t really add up or carry the emotional weight they should, because Judy and Jen are ideas more than characters — avatars of anger, grief and guilt. We’re told that their unexpected bond is based on giving each other the space to grieve in their own ways, but it often feels like they’re just indulging each other’s bad choices in ways that don’t make narrative sense.

Applegate, whose TV-comedy roots stretch back more than 30 years, most notably on “Married With Children,” gives a strained, uptight performance that superficially matches up with Jen’s personality but isn’t all that fun to watch. You don’t mind when she’s onscreen with Cardellini, though. Starring in a live-action comedy series for the first time since “Freaks and Geeks,” Cardellini gives Judy a vibrancy and a genuine peculiarity — she’s the show’s one consistent source of pleasure.

Otherwise the show always seems to be reaching for something — a complexity, an ambiguity — that it doesn’t support and doesn’t really need. It may be telling that one of the ways Jen and Judy bond is through a shared love of the 1980s chestnut “The Facts of Life.” If that’s Feldman’s way of signaling her own nostalgia for the moral certainties of an earlier sitcom era, it’s also an admission that there’s no going back.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/arts/television/dead-to-me-netflix-review.html" id="01ea4ab9-1f2f-3a64-ae5c-7e45218b1b70">The New York Times</a>.

This week’s case study in the anxieties of contemporary television: “Dead to Me,” a new series on Netflix starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as widows who meet cute at a grief support group.

Review: In 'Dead to Me' on Netflix, Widows Make the Best BFFs

How’s this for a state of emergency: An entire region of the country takes up armed resistance against the federal government, brazenly murdering and raping its African American citizens in a decadeslong campaign of terror that subverts and then rewrites the law.

More dire, certainly, than an invasion of criminal migrants at the border. And it actually happened.

The shockingly violent, depressingly predictable backlash in the American South to the end of slavery, and to the attempt to make freed slaves equal members of society, is the central concern of “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War,” a four-hour PBS series written and narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (It shows in two-hour installments, on Tuesday and on April 16.)

Among the many lacunae in Americans’ knowledge of their own history, our hazy notions of Reconstruction and its overthrow — essential to an understanding of so much in our own times, from the civil rights movement to today’s mirror-like rise of white nationalism — may be the most damaging. Many people, if they have any sense of the era at all, came by it through “Gone With the Wind” or, even more grievously, “The Birth of a Nation.”

So Gates’ series is a great service, especially in its first two hours, which cover the years from the end of the Civil War, with the initial enthusiasm and promise of Reconstruction, to the contested election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, which essentially ended the federal government’s efforts to enforce Reconstruction in the South.

The project mostly hews to the standard PBS history format, with a large cast of scholars and writers — more than 40 — talking over antique photographs and documents, with the occasional impressionistic recreation of events and snippets of gospel and ragtime. But it also incorporates contemporary images of violence and protest, and it is distinguished by Gates’ onscreen presence, talking to the camera while strolling through the story’s locales and interviewing inheritors of the struggle.

Without hitting us over the head, the series continually brings out connections and correspondences between then and now. One of the first great fruits of Reconstruction is the establishment, in the 14th Amendment, of birthright citizenship, now under attack. “Convict leasing” institutionalizes the unwarranted jailing of African American men and women to provide labor for plantations that no longer have slaves. Techniques like poll taxes and literacy tests are quickly invented to suppress the black vote.

“Fake news” campaigns alleging the rape of white women are used to incite and justify the indiscriminate killing and lynching of black men. Minstrelsy and blackface powerfully reinforce notions of white supremacy. Overwhelming efforts in the South to rewrite history and take slavery out of the Civil War narrative lead to the proliferation of Confederate monuments (and thus, more than a century later, to pitched battles and murder in Charlottesville, Virginia).

The series’ second two hours — which cover subjects like the Jim Crow system, the Ku Klux Klan, W.E.B. DuBois, the creation of the NAACP and the ascendance of black popular culture — are engrossing but less urgent. To cover so much ground, they settle into a more anecdotal, great-person approach. (For a more detailed look at some of the stories in this period, seek out the invaluable documentaries of Stanley Nelson, like “The Black Press” and “Tell Them We Are Rising: Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” both streaming online.)

It’s conceivable that “Reconstruction” could be criticized for being one-sided — for not finding someone to defend the romantic view of Confederate history, or to make the contemporary case that white Americans are economically and culturally victimized. It would be a baseless criticism from the point of view of scholarship or principle. One thought, though: The series’s accounts of violence against African Americans tend to have an abstract feeling, and some direct insight into the racist mindset could help to communicate its full force.

“Reconstruction” chooses to tell its story soberly and quietly. From the beginning, it silently establishes a predominant visual motif: photographic portraits of African Americans, singly and in groups small and large, in fields, yards and forest clearings, on church lawns, school steps and front porches. Their subjects look directly into the camera, proudly and, to the modern eye, accusingly. The succession of images insists on their dignity and humanity at a time when these qualities were brutally denied, a point made explicitly late in the series in a segment on the importance of photography in the African American community.

Their descendants continue to make that same case: Half of the 40-plus historians Gates has assembled are black. Calmly dissecting white America’s unceasing claim that they aren’t intelligent or civilized enough for full citizenship, those scholars are the irrefutable answer, still in plain sight after 400 years.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/arts/television/review-reconstruction-pbs.html" id="6b830e12-dca1-3771-a281-bde109b5b019">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

Review: Essential History in 'Reconstruction' on PBS

It didn’t do so well with awards voters and critics, though: not a single Emmy or Golden Globes nomination and, despite generally good reviews, no love in the year-end lists.

That combination wasn’t what one might have predicted for a show created by writer and actress Lena Waithe in the wake of her groundbreaking Emmy victory for the critical darling “Master of None.” (She was the first African-American woman to win the comedy-writing award.) And the palpable lack of buzz was a little mystifying for those of us who thought “The Chi” was one of last year’s best shows. Or maybe that was just me.

One theory: “The Chi” wasn’t the type of good show that people were expecting, or hoping for, from Waithe. It was earnest and domestic and largely traditional, a conspicuously well-made drama rather than a zeitgeist-y identity comedy. It didn’t look like “Master of None” or “Atlanta”; it called to mind the densely plotted, ZIP Code-as-destiny shows of David Simon, particularly “Treme.”

But Waithe’s series, set in Chicago’s South Side and focused on the entwined lives of four African-American males, had a lightness and (at times) a lyricism that Simon’s shows could benefit from.

“The Chi” was built around a series of shootings, and the way their repercussions rippled out through the lives of its large cast. But its best material was casual and observational. The testy relationships of the aspiring chef Brandon (Jason Mitchell) with his live-in girlfriend, Jerrika (Tiffany Boone), and his entrepreneurial frenemy Hannibal (Chris Lee) felt fresh. Even more original and entertaining were the story lines involving middle schoolers Kevin (Alex Hibbert), Papa (Shamon Brown Jr.) and Maisha (Genesis Denise Hale), whose hilariously passive-aggressive pursuit of the mild-mannered Kevin was the show’s single best idea.

That first season can be streamed on Showtime’s website or through Amazon Prime Video. It’s necessary if you’re going to understand what’s going on in Season 2, and maybe it’s sufficient. Because through five episodes of the new season, a lot of the shine is gone from “The Chi.” The story lines are largely continuous: the fallout from the killing of Brandon’s younger brother by the tortured Ronnie (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine); the strife between the player Emmett (Jacob Latimore) and Tiffany (Hannaha Hall), the mother of his child; Brandon’s constantly stymied efforts to get his food-truck business off the ground.

But the urgency has faded from them, partly because of a sense that the bones of Season 1 are being gnawed over for too long, but mostly because the show’s sensitivity and unpredictability are, at almost every moment, shading over into conventional melodrama and self-conscious point making. As characters make speeches about fatherhood and police corruption, and we sit through stiff, sentimental flashbacks to Ronnie’s stressful return from military duty in the Middle East, the show starts to feel like an earlier Showtime drama set in Chicago, the buppie soap opera “Soul Food.”

The middle schoolers are still used for comic relief — selling candy bars to parishioners as they break a fast, engaging in a food fight on school picture day — but the situations have more of a tinny sitcom quality, and the young actors’ performances are correspondingly less joyful. (Hale still makes the most of every minute on screen, though.) Mitchell and Latimore feel stuck, too, with Brandon’s and Emmett’s stories taking on a flattened, didactic tone they didn’t have in Season 1. The major new twist to the plot, a mystery element apparently involving gentrification, is playing out slowly but already feels forced into what’s been a distinctively organic narrative.

The cast turnover between seasons was small, though Sonja Sohn, as Brandon’s hard-edge mother, and Steven Williams, as an old-school gangbanger, are missed. The one big change was the replacement of showrunner Elwood Reid by Ayanna Floyd Davis.

Their producing and writing credits aren’t dissimilar — “The Bridge” and “Cold Case” for Reid, “Empire” and “Hannibal” for Davis — and it’s never a good idea to place too much credit or blame on one person in the ecosystem of a TV series. But chemistry matters, and in Season 2 the formula’s off.

— Second season of “The Chi” begins Sunday on Showtime.

Review 'The Chi' returns to the south side of Chicago

The first season of “The Chi,” on Showtime, pulled a solid audience for a premium-cable prestige drama — about 700,000 an episode, enough to bring it back for a second season that starts Sunday.

Review: 'The Chi' returns to the south side of Chicago

Nearly 50 years ago, Bruce Lee shopped around an eight-page pitch for a television series about a Chinese immigrant with martial-arts skills, a “hatchet man” in the 1870s San Francisco Tong Wars who journeys through the American West. A year later, a similar show, “Kung Fu,” was on the air starring a white man (David Carradine). But at long last, some justice: Lee’s original treatment has been turned into a series starring a mixed-race actor (like Lee) and a headlining cast that’s majority Asian.

Of course, there were some things Lee couldn’t have foreseen in 1971. For one, the current widely shared sense that the scales of social justice need a historical rebalancing, which probably helped the new series get greenlighted and certainly affected its scripts. For another, Cinemax.

So the “Warrior” that premieres Friday on said premium-cable channel for a 10-episode run (eight were available to critics) is not exactly the “slam-bang Western action adventure series” Lee imagined in his notes for a show tentatively titled “Ah Sahm,” after its high-kicking hero.

There is a lot of fighting, of many varieties — kung fu and hatchets in the street for the Chinese characters, bare-knuckle brawling for the whites (mostly Irishmen), and some Wild West gunplay in a stand-alone episode at a stage stop that pays tribute to both John Ford and Tsui Hark. Supervised by Brett Chan, who worked on “Iron Fist” and “Marco Polo,” it’s stylish and down to earth (no wire work). It’s also deceptively mild in the first episode or two but gets increasingly, even hyperbolically graphic as the season goes along.

But “Warrior” has competing agendas that keep distracting you from the action. One is completely understandable: the framework of racism and racial oppression, which is omnipresent from the opening scene when Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) gets off the boat in San Francisco and beats up three dockyard “bulls” who are pushing around the arriving Chinese. What’s justified or necessary from a historical standpoint, though, can get monotonous in dramatic terms when it’s presented in ham-handed and obvious ways. (“Strange, the way you talk. If I closed my eyes, you could be anyone.”)

And there’s a cognitive dissonance between the show’s racial consciousness and some of its more Cinemax-friendly attributes, like the constant nudity of Asian actresses. (Conveniently, one of the primary settings is a brothel.) Two female characters, Ah Toy (Olivia Cheng) and Mai Ling (Dianne Doan), have been empowered in ways far beyond anything the handful of Chinese women in 19th-century San Francisco would have experienced. And yet every speaking role for a Chinese woman is a prostitute, a madam or a concubine, and even the lead actresses dutifully shed their clothes, as if paying a Cinemax tax.

And the Cinemaxness of it all shouldn’t be a surprise, since “Warrior” — a project pushed by Lee’s daughter, Shannon, and director Justin Lin — is primarily the work of writer and producer Jonathan Tropper, whose previous series, the small-town noir “Banshee,” ran on the channel for four seasons. “Warrior” shares some of the propulsiveness and energy of that show but lacks its conviction and its sense of place, in part because of the artificiality of the antique San Francisco recreated on elaborate South African sets.

You can see the broad, pulp-fiction outlines of the story Tropper has set up. Ah Sahm and Mai Ling, star-crossed brother and sister on opposite sides of the Tong War, will have an eventual reckoning, and Ah Sahm and Leary (Dean Jagger), the monstrous Irish labor agitator, will eventually square off. But the show is weighed down with subplots among its white characters in the police force and city hall — one senator is trotted on-screen once in a while to make an ominous reference to the Chinese exclusion act he’s sponsoring — and characters we care about, like Cheng’s formidable brothel owner Ah Toy, aren’t given enough to do.

Koji, an actor of Japanese and British descent who hasn’t been seen much in America, is effective in the fight scenes, and there’s a sense of humor in his reactions and inflections that grows on you as the season goes along. He’s a little short on Lee-like charisma, though, and that stands out, because one thing “Warrior” has no lack of is charismatic Asian actors: Hoon Lee as a Chinatown fixer, Jason Tobin of Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow” as a Tong heir and action star Joe Taslim of “The Raid” as a leader of a rival gang.

How does “Warrior” match up with Bruce Lee’s vision? His typed and handwritten notes certainly anticipated opium dealing and hatchet and martial-arts battles. On the other hand, they also see Ah Sahm as a man who will “awaken the long abused Chinese people ... and make freedom and progress the keystone of their philosophy.” It looks like that will have to wait for another season.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9c3b3e65-a2e4-434f-a274-212705cc30d6" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/arts/television/warrior-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: 'Warrior,' pitched by Bruce Lee and made by cinemax

The story behind “Warrior” is irresistible.

He managed to keep his four families mostly secret from one another during his lifetime, and his children (and many grandchildren) only got to know one another more than 40 years after he died.

Sounds like a movie. And it is, or in any case a three-part BBC miniseries, which begins Sunday on PBS’ “Masterpiece.” But Alexander Wilson, better known as Alec, isn’t the main character in the show, which is called “Mrs. Wilson<a id="b2937359-eda1-4ef6-9e47-130eb40c9fa8" href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/mrs-wilson/">”</a> and takes place mostly after his death in 1963.

That’s what happens when you devote your life to secrecy and, despite publishing 27 books, never tell your own story. But mainly that’s what happens when one of your curious grandchildren turns out to be a famous actress. Ruth Wilson of “Luther” and “The Affair” is the granddaughter of Alec’s third wife, Alison, and she plays her victimized, mystified grandmother in “Mrs. Wilson,” of which she’s also an executive producer.

So rather than the historical adventure or romance it might have been in an earlier era, “Mrs. Wilson” is an interrogation of history, a feminist critique of mid-20th-century British society, a mystery and, least satisfyingly, a character study. The strangeness of the story, and Ruth Wilson’s characteristic intensity, pull us along. But Alison and Alec, and their motivations, never seem to come completely into focus. The series feels caught between fiction and real life, as if the writers (Anna Symon and Tim Crook) and the director (Richard Laxton) were unwilling to fully dramatize a history that’s still murky, partly hidden in the files of the British Foreign Office.

“Mrs. Wilson” begins with Alec’s sudden death, a shock to Alison and their two sons, Gordon and Nigel (Ruth Wilson’s father). That shock is compounded when Gladys Wilson (Elizabeth Rider), a woman claiming to be Alec’s wife, shows up at Alison’s house and demands to be given his body for burial.

That sets Alison on a dual path of discovery and duplicity, as she investigates her husband’s past while resolutely hiding it from her sons, believing that it’s best not to disillusion them. Helping her in her quest, reluctantly and exceedingly begrudgingly, is Coleman, Alec’s former handler at MI6. (Fiona Shaw, who plays the haughty spymaster for laughs in “Killing Eve,” manages to give “Mrs. Wilson” a glimmer of humor while playing the much more dour Coleman.)

Other wives and children begin to pile up, along with evidence that Alec may have been a serial fabulist who was not only a bad husband but also a bad spy and a general deadbeat. Whether in deference to the story’s uncertainties, or to the demands of television melodrama, the possibility is left open that this semi-fictional Alec was just a romantic rogue at heart. The show’s real indictment is of those who enable him and make excuses for him, including the government and the church. Even after Alec’s death, Alison is asked to trust him in the language of religion — to maintain her faith in him no matter what she learns.

Ruth Wilson has made a habit of playing women defined by their determination and obstinacy under duress, and Alison is right in that wheelhouse. (Her performance and the miniseries were nominated for BAFTA awards, to be handed out on May 12.) Wilson expertly delineates Alison’s growing dismay and anger along with the increasing strain of trying to maintain, for her sons’ sake, the reality Alec created. If there’s a problem with the portrayal, it’s that Wilson radiates an intelligence and pragmatism (as she always does) that don’t entirely jibe with what we’re seeing — how could Alison have been fooled so completely?

That’s one of the many questions that “Mrs. Wilson” can’t, or won’t, definitively answer. It’s more disconcerting than usual when, at the end of the series, Alexander Wilson’s surviving children and their families are assembled on-screen. What we’ve seen over the last three hours shouldn’t have happened, but they’re the proof.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c25b3832-a6ce-4259-800d-d025da4af841" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/arts/television/mrs-wilson-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: In 'Mrs. Wilson,' an actress uncovers her grandfather's lies

Alexander Wilson lived an improbable, deceitful, destructive but undeniably intriguing life. An author of popular spy novels and a British secret agent himself in World War II, he married four women from the 1920s through the ‘50s without bothering to divorce any of them.

So of course there’s a new “Hanna,” a series created for Amazon Prime Video by one of the film’s screenwriters (David Farr) with the film’s director (Joe Wright) as a consultant. It tells a story similar in outline to the one in the movie: Hanna, a genetically altered teenage girl raised in the forest and trained for battle by the gruff father figure Erik, goes out into the world to confront Marissa, the wicked witch-CIA agent-evil stepmother who created her. Except now it’s close to eight hours long instead of two.

Like its heroine, the series is an exercise in modification — how to quadruple a story’s length as well as leave it open-ended. And as with Hanna herself, the results are mixed: mostly sad, with a glimmer of hope at the end.

One of Farr’s primary strategies (he wrote seven of the series’ eight episodes) is to jettison the original’s most distinctive feature. The film told a fairly conventional action story in the style of a fairy tale, with explicit references to the Brothers Grimm to drive the point home, and Wright had the technique and sensibility to make it work. The characters functioned as both action-movie conventions and mythical heroes and monsters. The story moved through fantastic (but real) landscapes by a fairy-tale logic, and the viewer shared Hanna’s wonder at the beauty and corruption of the world she’d been sequestered from.

In the series, the Grimms are gone, and Hanna (played by young British actress Esme Creed-Miles) is less magical heroine and more angtsy teenage supersoldier — la femme Nikita without the clingy dresses. The heroes are less heroic and the baddies less monstrous, and their back stories are expanded in ways that make them more “complex” but no more interesting. The mysteries of Hanna’s past are explored in much greater detail, while the sense of mystery never quite takes hold.

The literalization of the story for streaming-series purposes is encapsulated in the new opening, a long, expository chase scene that was a brief flashback in the film. Another crucial change in the first episode, discreetly slipped into the dialogue, recasts the entire plot, changing the motive for Hanna’s mission from revenge to survival — a switch that lowers the intensity but opens the door for complications, digressions and future seasons.

A more prosaic “Hanna” could certainly succeed on its own terms in the crowded field of action-oriented conspiracy thriller. The bigger problem, though, is that most of what Farr has added to pad out the story is drab filler: marital strife in the normal family that shelters Hanna, Marissa’s problems with work-life balance, boyfriend tensions between Hanna and her pal Sophie. (Rhianne Barreto, as the angry Sophie, gives the show’s most energetic and engaging performance.) The series is filled with all the things that Wright, in the film, proved the story could do without.

Beating “Hanna” the series with the stick of “Hanna” the film would be less fair if the series didn’t, through about six episodes, hew so closely to the framework of the movie. And you can’t really address the subject without noting the perfect casting in the original of Saoirse Ronan as Hanna, with her ability to be both ethereal and feral, dreamlike and convincingly physical. Creed-Miles, by comparison, is, well, a good soldier. Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman, as Marissa and Erik, work hard in roles that have been glummed down from what Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana played in the original.

If you stick with Amazon’s “Hanna,” its energy and interest (if not originality) tick up in the last couple episodes, when the story definitively moves beyond that of the movie and capitalizes on a couple of plot possibilities that the film closed off or glossed over. Yasmin Monet Prince, a striking British actress with a very short list of screen credits, turns up as a character you wish had been around for the previous six hours. Suddenly it feels like you’re in a fairy tale again.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/arts/television/hanna-review.html" id="431ee0d3-36b1-396b-a313-b9ef886cd048">The New York Times</a>.

“Hanna,” released in 2011, was not a film that called out for a remake or a sequel. It had a singular style, and a delicacy — despite its frequent beatdowns and gunbattles — that would suffer from duplication. Bookended by parallel killings, it was a self-contained chronicle of an obsessive and successful quest for revenge that left no important questions unanswered.

Review: Amazon's 'Hanna,' Genetically Modified for Streaming Video

OK, I don’t actually know what drives Elba, who created (with Gary Reich) and stars in “Turn Up Charlie.” But despite his action hero persona and style-icon status, there is evidence that his heart isn’t entirely in playing unnerving gangsters (Stringer Bell, “The Wire”), heroic cops (John Luther, “Luther”) and Asgardian sentries (Heimdall, Marvel Cinematic Universe).

He’s been a working musician for as long as he’s been an actor, and finds the time to maintain a second career as a DJ, producer, rapper and singer; he’s scheduled to perform at Coachella next month. That’s no hobby.

And then he squeezes in a third career as the Norman Lear (or the Mike Leigh, more aptly) of London’s West African immigrant community. He created and wrote the 2018 series “In the Long Run,” a kitchen-sink comedy about a family that shared his Sierra Leonean roots, before making “Turn Up Charlie,” in which he plays the title character, an old-school DJ who’s 20 years past his lone hit and too ashamed to tell his parents back in Nigeria that he’s a failure.

The new series takes an early turn away from naturalism, though. David (J.J. Feild), a childhood friend of Charlie’s who’s become a Hollywood star, returns to London with his wife, Sara (Piper Perabo), a famous DJ, so that their 11-year-old daughter, Gabrielle (Frankie Hervey), can settle down and get the kind of British schooling her father too fondly remembers.

David and Sara’s commitment to full-time parenting is only calf-leather deep, however, which leads to the show’s echt-sitcom contrivance: They recruit the barely employed Charlie as nanny for their holy terror of a daughter. So: “Who’s the Boss” with a washed-up British DJ instead of a washed-up U.S. baseball player.

And there’s a fair measure of the kind of embarrassing sitcommery this premise would lead you to expect. If you can live without seeing Idris Elba saying “I’m adorbs” to an 11-year-old girl, you can live without “Turn Up Charlie.” In addition to being regularly humiliated by the wiseacre child he has to chase around London and Ibiza, Charlie also has to endure the put-downs of his saucy auntie, Lydia (Jocelyn Jee Esien), who dispenses wisdom about romance to him and parenting to his white friends.

Elba is admirably committed to the drab, sentimental material (written by Georgia Lester, Victoria Asare-Archer, Laura Neal and Femi Oyeniran), and his portrayal is unfailingly gracious and warm. He’s a gung-ho, grizzled straight man, readily playing against his superheroic image. (Although Charlie is still fought over by the ladies, and there are some oddly graphic discussions of the size of his cartridge.)

One problem, though: He’s just not funny. Elba’s considerable skills in projecting menace and resolve don’t come into play, and he mostly just looks genial and a little lost. With the exception of a few supporting players, like Esien and Guz Khan as Charlie’s stoner buddy, that’s a problem up and down the call sheet — reasonably talented performers with no aptitude for comedy.

The new Netflix series “Turn Up Charlie” gets to the heart of Idris Elba, sitting at the intersection of his two passions: being a DJ and making heartwarming dramedies that reflect his working-class London origins.

Mike Hale

Articles written by the author

Review: 'The Boys' Deconstructs the Superhero, With a Light Touch

'South Side' and 'Sherman's Showcase': Two Flavors of Nostalgia

'Veronica Mars' and the One-Great-Season Debate

'Veronica Mars' and the One-Great-Season Debate

Review: Welcome back, sitcom high school

Review: Rebooting 'Das Boot,' on land and sea

'Luther,' back from the dead

Review: Good Cop, Bad Cop, Crazy Cop in 'Line of Duty'

Review: Can this marriage be saved (at the local pub)?

Review: 'Chernobyl,' the Disaster Movie

Review: In 'Dead to Me' on Netflix, Widows Make the Best BFFs

Review: Essential History in 'Reconstruction' on PBS

Review: 'The Chi' returns to the south side of Chicago

Review: 'Warrior,' pitched by Bruce Lee and made by cinemax

Review: In 'Mrs. Wilson,' an actress uncovers her grandfather's lies

Review: Amazon's 'Hanna,' Genetically Modified for Streaming Video

In 'Turn Up Charlie,' the Manny Isn't Just a Man, He's Idris Elba

5 new international series visit 5 far-flung crime scenes

For 'Crashing,' the third season was the charm, also the end

John Mulaney and Seth Meyers Fondly Send Up Sondheim and He's Amused