Daredevil (season 1)
Miss Fisher's Murder
Mysteries (pilot +2 episodes)
Sense8 (season 1)
Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp (8 episodes)
Master of None (season 1)
With Bob and David (4 episodes)
Jessica Jones (season 1)
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If we've learned anything from the past two years of Marvel Studios' television efforts, it's that it operates best when confined.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. seems to challenge the audience to enjoy it week to week, like some sort of sick dare. The demands of filling out a 22-episode order while dovetailing in precisely-timed plot elements from the cinematic world is definitely more hassle than it's been worth. Even with focused story lines it seems like an aimless show, and for some time Marvel's television wing looked dire. Then
Marvel's Agent Carter came along with an 8-episode order, tightly plotted with clear focus, and was one of the most exciting and entertaining shows of the year (if not exactly a ratings blockbuster).
Daredevil season 1 appeared on Netflix in May with a 13-episode order and played out more like a mini-series or, well, 13-hour movie rather than a TV show. It was definitely built for binge-watching, as is the Netflix way.
If each of Marvel's films are supposed to tackle a particular genre (
Ant-Man is a heist film,
Guardians of the Galaxy a space opera,
Captain America: Winter Soldier a 70's spy thriller, etc) then
Daredevil follows that lead by being a heavy, HBO-style, R-rated crime drama, and it does it very, very well. While the first season does act, in a way, as an origin story, it's decidedly not the focus. The first episode opens with Matt Murdock (
Charlie Cox) already in disguise, battling on the streets and docks of Hell's Kitchen, while trying to establish a respectable law firm with his best buddy, Foggy Nelson (
Eldon Hensen). The tagline could easily be "what he can't do in the courtroom, he does on the streets", but that's terribly lame and thankfully they didn't use it.
The show manages to worm its way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe quite easily, by noting that Hell's Kitchen has fallen on hard times once more (after years of gentrification) in the two years since the alien invasion of New York that occurred in
The Avengers. A coalition of crime lords has taken up residency and sliced up the neighbourhood, but it's a fragile arrangement which breaks easily when a masked vigilante starts to expose their weaknesses to each other. Wilson Fisk (
Vincent D'Onofrio) negotiates these frailties and establishes himself as Kingpin, despite wishing to stay in the shadows. The show could have so very easily painted Fisk as a larger-than-life villain, but D'Onofrio finds an extremely vulnerable core for the character. He's a man who's doubtlessly smart and ruthlessly brutal, but he's got a tortured past, and a new love in his life who, more than anyone and more than anything, he wants her respect. How the show negotiates Fisk, and just as much how it validates his relationship with Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) is its most deft and brilliant touch. Vanessa is not in the dark about what Fisk does, and she's not an accomplice either. She's a woman who understands power and is willing to support the man she loves in his misguided campaign to remake Hell's Kitchen into more than it ever has been.
Murdock and Nelson are joined in their firm by Karen Page (
Deborah Ann Woll) as their clerk, whose own experiences with the corrupt landlords of Hell's Kitchen draws her deeper into the conspiracies of the criminal underworld. She gets some assistance from Ben Urich (a fantastic
Vondie Curtis-Hall) but knows she's way in over her head. The show gets a lot of credit for showing Karen's resiliency as well as giving her character-defining moments that are completely separate from the main character. She gets a really nice arc. Foggy's character moments are more defined by his relationships with Matt and Karen, but the episode where Foggy has to deal with discovering Matt's vigilante activities, his supernatural abilities, and face a history of lies is one of the absolute best dramatic hours of the year, and certainly a trope of superhero storytelling that rarely gets explored with such depth and emotion.
The series sells itself beautifully at the end of episode two, with a knock-down, drag-out, one-take, no-cuts hallway brawl between Daredevil and a gang of thugs. I'm certain it takes inspiration from a similar scene in
Old Boy, and perhaps the confined-space fights of
Snowpiercer and
The Raid 2. Through flashbacks with Matt Murdock as a young boy, we learn of his relationship with his father, a boxer who wasn't the greatest but could always take a punch and would always finish a fight standing), so the Daredevil mantra is "get back up, never quit", and boy does the show ever show Matt taking a beating.
The show deals with many themes: fathers and sons, friendship, secret lives, and the power of the truth, among others, and they're all quite deftly handled. If the show falls flat at any point, it's in its final moments, the rather unclimactic final battle between Daredevil (finally in full costume) and the Kingpin. Its an event that seems like an afterthought, occurring in a plain back alley without much flare at all. A big action setpiece wasn't exactly called for, but something a bit more elaborate, a bit more in scale of the show was certainly more deserved.
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I have no shortage of love for stories and characters. If I could do nothing else in life but read and watch and consume, I would actually be quite content. I endeavor to do so, often, but as real life busies up, investing too much thought and time into a character or a world becomes more and more difficult. So when something captures my attention and makes me not just love it, but fall in love with it, that's a pretty special moment. I kind of had that earlier this year with
Peggy Carter, which put on display the character's immense strength that
Captain America: The First Avenger never truly let resonate. The show also gave glimpses into the character's vulnerability (not weaknesses per se), showing that she wasn't Thor or the Hulk or even Captain America, but still a regular (if exceptional) person.
Phryne Fisher is very much a character in the same vein as Peggy (or perhaps it's vice-versa), a tough as nails, whip-smart, resourceful, witty, utterly charming and disarmingly attractive (moreso because of her personality) woman who, like Peggy, exists in an era where women were almost unanimously deemed the inferior sex and could only contribute to society in a limited manner. Why Peggy butts heads with the establishment, in no real position to affect dramatic institutional change, Phryne is wealthy enough that the establishment at least has to pay attention to her, if only to humor her (but even by humoring her, she gets exactly what she wants).
Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries is, on the one hand, a by-the-numbers
Poirot or
Miss Marple-like light detective series based off a character who originally appeared in a modern series of novels. On the other hand, it takes place in the early 1920's in Melbourne and deals with stories that era-authentic novels wouldn't touch, such as mixed race marriages, homosexuality and abortion (that's just in the first three episodes). It's a tad revisionist, in a way, but it's also heartening to see stories such as these which take a more liberal standpoint than society at the time was actually willing to consider. That these stories still echo the modern day just highlights their ingeniousness in construction (if not exactly groundbreaking execution).
I would call Phryne an epic woman, not just a detective but a real Jacqueline-of-all-trades, in the James Bond fashion. Her roots in the world run far and deep, and she can not only handle an airplane and her liquor, but she can handle herself. She's glamorous and sexy but unafraid to get her hands (or clothes) dirty. She unapologetically enjoys recreational sex and drugs, which implies a cavalier attitude, but the truth is she cares deeply about people and society, even when she doesn't agree with them.
Essie Davis radiates intense amounts of charisma every moment she's on screen. She commands the screen so resoundingly that as unbelievable as Phryne Fisher should be, she makes her not only work, but captivating. The rest of the cast is charming as well, a solid supporting ensemble to the last, but there's no doubt that Davis is the star of the show, and, along with her leading turn in the sleeper hit
The Babadook, she should be crashing Hollywood any minute now as the next big bad in a Marvel movie or starting an action franchise of her own.
Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries only holds the barest thread of ongoing narrative, as such it doesn't command a binge watch. It's more of an apertif, an amuse-bouche, something sweet and flavourful to savor on occasion.
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When
Sense8 debuted, it did so to a lot of confusion. Advance reviews were middling at best because reviewers seemed to have been given only the first three episodes of the globe-hopping sci-fi epic, and it became utterly evident that the fourth episode was truly the series' lynchpin. In that fourth episode the crux of the series is laid bare, the mythology explained and the threats were made real. Even with that clarity, the show would still be a difficult one for many to grasp, as it played heavily with themes of gender and sexual identity, and asked its viewer to invest in a cast that honestly had never been presented before, all while toying with the science fictional concept of a group mind. It's not an easy sell. People coming into it based on the names attached --
Matrix creators
Lana and
Andy Wachowski, and
Babylon 5's
J. Michael Straczynski -- maybe were expecting something more pulpy, more space operatic, more fantastical, and surely there was some disappointment in that.
Yet
Sense8 delivered roughly 12 hours of "television" (it's Netflix) that was rich and diverse in character and story, presenting an unfamiliar world (both real visions and made-up constructs) that took the viewer on a trip to different lands (from Mexico City to Nairobi to Berlin to Mumbai) and into different cultures, which seemed just as much the point as the story it was telling. Of equal importance was having a trans woman as one of the main characters (Nomi's story no doubt was particularly personal to Lana Wachowski).
The sexuality, particularly of the gay and trans characters, was prominently on display, almost to a point of not having much straight sex represented at all. It's hard to say that it wasn't confrontational, showing Nomi and Amanita mid- and post-coitus, nor is it easy to think that showing an honest romantic and sexual relationship between Lito and Hernando wasn't a decided choice. But the world is better for them, not only as titillation, but as habituation. If we can get used to graphic violence as we have over the past few decades, then relatively truthful depictions of queer relationships should be just as easy.
For all its progressiveness,
Sense8 isn't a flawless show. There's elements of its international cast that seem reductive and stereotypical, as well, the show has a bit of difficulty juggling its ensemble episode-to-episode, while equally maintaining a consistent narrative. Some of the characters have more engaging stories than others, though a lot of that seems to be in the eye of the viewer, as I've discovered in many conversations on the series. But there's no doubt that by the end of episode 12, it feels like it finally found its footing, and "season 1" ends on what feels more like a mid-season break then truly the end of its first run.
Season 2 has been greenlit, and I await it with much anticipation
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I missed out on the sketch comedy of The State entirely. It was a product of the mid-90's MTV original programming push (which also saw the likes of
The Real World,
The Ben Stiller Show, and
Singled Out come to air), filling the gap as the outre sketch-com of record between the
Kids in the Hall and
Mr. Show with Bob and David. But in Canada we didn't have MTV at that time, we had MuchMusic, which was (for better and worse) not the same thing. I wasn't even aware of The State or its 11-member crew until I started delving into the comedy podcast surge circa 2009. Then suddenly it seemed the influence of The State was everywhere.
Reno 9-11 was probably the most prominent, but faces and names like
Ken Marino,
Thomas Lennon,
Joe Lo Truglio,
David Wain,
Michael Showalter and
Michael Ian Black just kept cropping up over and over again, especially in those comedy podcasts. I had barely, if ever, heard of these guys, and yet they were revered, legendary almost, and one of the repeated works of note was something called
Wet Hot American Summer ("Wet Hot" for short).
When I finally got around to watching
Wet Hot, I found it amusing, but not the groundbreaking comedy that it had been touted, and not something I went back to. Yet, there was a charm to it -- a cast (which also included non-State players like
Molly Shannon,
Janeane Garofalo and
David Hyde Pierce, rounded out by future celebs like
Bradley Cooper,
Paul Rudd,
Elizabeth Banks and
Amy Pohler) that seemed fully invested in the bit (of 20 and 30-somethings playing high-school age camp counselors), and an absurdity that is both subversive and overt -- something that over time cemented itself in my mind as representative of the cult classic it had become.
The Netflix follow-up series,
Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, despite all my podcast listening, snuck up on me, a genuine surprise when I caught wind of its existence only a few weeks before its release. No only was the entire cast returning, but it was expanding, ballooning out of control almost with guest shots from some of my favourite comedic actors and podcast personalities (
H. Jon Benjamin, Michaela Watkins, Randall Park, Jordan Peele, Weird Al, Kristen Wiig) . Yes, even those big time celebs - Banks, Cooper, Pohler, and Rudd - were back in, with cast member from
Mad Men (
Jon Hamm, John Slattery, Rich Sommer) joining the fray too. Even if it was a trainwreck, it would still be a sight to behold.
It's anything but. Certainly it's not everyone's cup of tea, but nearly fifteen years after the release of the original film, for the same cast to return to the same roles, in ostensibly a prequel is a delightful slice of mad genius. With eight half-hour episodes,
First Day acts as ostensibly a four-hour movie rather than a TV series proper, and it features a wealth of comedic performers, writers, and directors at the height of their ability. Even at 4 hours, it feels even more focused than the original
Wet Hot and the narrative arc is thoroughly more satisfying. It deftly manages to speckle itself with references to the original film without lazily relying upon "remember this" punchlines or stalling the film with in jokes that stifle the comedy. I didn't have a fresh viewing of
Wet Hot under my belt so most of the references flew over my head obliviously, not as curiously stilted lines.
Perhaps the most amazing feat of
First Day is the way creators Wain and Showalter negotiated the cast, where obviously many of the bigger celebrities only had limited days to work on the film. There are times the absence of a character on screen is felt, or the continuity of the narrative as it jumps between scenes and sets feels highly incongruous, but then that's also part of the absurdist charm. When one of the goals is to create, cast, reherse, and perform a complex musical in the span of 8 hours, logic and time get thrown out the window. Likewise, rationalizing these largely 40-something performers playing teenage counselors is also something one has to let go of, or rather appreciate the intent therein.
I revisited the original
Wet Hot after watching
First Day and found it a more rewarding experience as a result. Unlike some comedies which tend to cannibalize their source material,
First Day expands and enriches the ridiculous world of Camp Firewood. The story of Wet Hot doesn't scream for more, but the experience certainly does. It would be wise for Wain and Showalter to find another genre worth lovingly parodying,
Christopher Guest style.
---
Master of None creators
Aziz Ansari and
Alan Yang have created the perfect anti-cringe comedy.
After
Seinfeld emerged as one of the biggest TV comedies of all-time, the language of humour on TV changed. With peers like
The Larry Sanders Show and successors like
Curb Your Enthusiasm and
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the genre of "cringe comedy" has become a staple of television. At its purest it's about awful people doing bad things or being involved in bad situations, both of which they should be smart enough to avoid. With this kind of humour there's the inevitability, that the characters are going to get found out, that everything's going to fall apart, and in that tension of waiting for it to happen they find humour.
Almost every sit com treads in this style of comedy, though it's more often than not the single-camera comedies as opposed to the traditional 3-camera, "live in front of a studio audience", situation comedies that play deeper into the genre (the conventional sitcom generally wants you to like their characters, while a single camera comedy wants you to like them too, but also hate them just a little bit). This expectation of things going wrong, of heightened comedic situations, is the norm on TV, which is what makes
Master of None so intriguing.
It's a show about nice people living normal lives, having conversations (sometimes mature, sometimes silly), exploring ideas and being almost 100% relatable even if they're in different careers, living in different cities, and having different cultural backgrounds. It's a show about many things, but the key is understanding, and to have a central character, Ansari's Dev, actually show an aptitude for learning, growth, and change as a person is almost shocking in a world where sitcom characters generally need to be stagnate.
Ansari is one of the biggest touring stand-up comedians in North America, and having been a fan of his for over a decade now I've watch him evolved from a comic who had a delightful skewered view on observational (and sometimes political) comedy into someone with a genuine interest in society and how it works, examining the way people are different, the same, and how they connect on those grounds, as friends, lovers and enemies. This perspective informs both Dev and the show as a whole. Each of its 10 episodes is themed, from children to parents, dating to cohabitating, not always original topics but explored in the most unique of ways. The inaugural episode, for instance, opens with Dev having sex (when's the last time...or the first time even...you've seen an Indian character on TV having a sexual relationship?) only to stop and worriedly proclaim that the condom broke. This leads to a frank, yet funny, examination about what the fallout could be and whether taking the Plan B pill is the right decision (again, one waits for the cringe factor to arrive, never to appear). From there Dev explores with his friends the idea of what it would like to be a dad, from the perspective of people who are in no stage of life to be parents. The show then takes Dev and friends to a children's birthday party (where in a normal cringe comedy, the childless adults tend to make it an event to exhibit extreme self-centered behavour, here it's really an exploration of parenthood from outside eyes) and follows it up with Dev taking a friend's children out for a day around New York (again, where you're trained to wait for something bad to happen, like the kids running off, or getting hurt, here it's about Dev understanding how exhausting kids can be). Even as the show explores this topic of kids and parenting, it's smart, insightful, but doesn't come to any pat, definite answers, but there's sincerity and some consolation in watching people explore those thoughts and ideas in an honest manner.
The show continues like this for its remaining nine episodes, exploring its themes with the same forthright nature. The best episodes have a tremendous amount of heart, such as Dev and his friend Bryan, both first generation Americans, exploring their parents origins from India and Korea, having been afforded the luxury of detachment from their parents hardships (Ansari's own mother and father play Dev's parents, and while they're not naturally gifted actors, they emit a tremendous amount of charm). A later episode, titled "Indians on TV", explores the very issue of how Indian characters are portrayed on television, quite hilariously, but also with much provocation, calling out the industry for demanding any Indian-American actor use "the accent". There's so many things happening here you just don't see on TV and done so in a manner that defies convention.
Despite tackling a new theme each episode, there is a through-line in the series of Dev's relationship with Rachel (the ridiculously adorable
Noel Wells), as it goes from the inaugural episode's drunken hook-up to their fraught cohabitation. The chemistry is amazing between Wells and Ansari, making it utterly easy to invest in their relationship, which results in one of the most rewarding romantic comedies in some time (but don't let "rom com" scare you off, it's more in the
Before Sunrise,
Richard Linklater style than a
Katherine Heigl joint) . At ten episodes,
Master of None is too good to have this short a run. I caught wind that more episodes are being written, and by all accounts it sounds like feedback for the show has been quite positive, so I'm hoping a second season (if not multiple seasons) is swiftly announced as this is a show with a voice that needs to be heard. Plus it's got incredible style and great taste in music.
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I brought up
Mr. Show with Bob and David earlier in relation to The State as seminal sketch comedy programs of the 1990s. The implication there is I was on top of the
Mr. Show show scene at the time, but truth is I largely came at it from behind, with the DVD releases in the early 2000s. Not only wasn't I really invested in Mr. Show when it ran, but I'm not even certain I liked the show on DVD...not at first anyway.
Mr. Show was very conceptual comedy, and not necessarily an idea that universal. They tended to be concepts that made creators
Bob Odenkirk and
David Cross laugh because they tweaked their particular skewered sense of comedy, pop culture and society. It took me multiple viewings of
Mr. Show's four-season run on DVD to really get the majority of it, but even then it was in large part thanks to the spectacular commentary tracks that I actually felt a part of the joke. In those commentaries, Bob, David and their cast of writers and performers sat down and doled out stories behind the sketches which brought them to life in a way that they didn't have on their own.
This isn't to say that Mr. Show wasn't funny on its own, because it was, but the true depth of many of the sketches would only reveal themselves if you knew the points of reference or even the frame of mind of their creators. Without the context, Cross, Odenkirk and company come across as alternately angry or silly, dishing out skit with bite, or ridiculous skits about people falling down (or sometimes just crude, base humour put into a context where its not usually found).
The four-episode Netflix reunion,
...With Bob and David picks up from
Mr. Show as if it hasn't missed a beat. The majority of the cast and crew has gone on to do their own things -- with Odenkirk breaking out on
Breaking Bad into
Better Call Saul, Cross featuring in countless movies and shows not to mention his tremendous standup,
Paul F. Tompkins having become one of podcast's premiere improv and character comedians, and
Tom Kenny making a mint from voicing Spongebob amongst others -- they all come together to reunite and get back to the same vision they had before. One would think that as they grew and changed as people that their comedy would be somewhat different, but it's pretty much the same. It's barbed and ridiculous in equal measure, the types of characters one could expect (hateful, self centric people are commonly thrust into situations which they can only make more awkward) are plentiful.
While the majority of sketches feel like par for the Bob and David course, there are a couple of standouts, including
Better Roots, a filmed piece that finds its director whitewashing Alex Haley's roots to make slaves into "helpers" and make the white farm runners look like kind, generous employers (super funny dude Brandon Johnson gets a fantastic lead role here). Another posits what the "Jew-run Hollywood" would look like if it were "Muslim-run Hollywood" instead. While not outright hilarious, they are provocatively funny, and somehow feature a sensibility of smart and stupid in some common measure.
The 4-episode season is remarkably brisk, an over-before-it-began kind of feeling, but at the same time it does feel quite special to get this diverse range of talents together, including appearances from most of the original supporting cast (notably missing Jerry Minor, Sarah Silverman, and Jack Black). There's a behind-the-scenes making-of "5th episode" that, like the audio commentaries on the DVD of yore, provide a peek into the process. In one particularly delightful moment we see Cross' interview casually interrupted by Odenkirk as imprompteu through a sketch idea for a few minutes. It's incredible watching them work through these things in these moments, and a delight. To see the ideas gestate, it's almost better than the polished product (at times it is).
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If you don't know Marvel's Jessica Jones prior to watching
Marvel's Jessica Jones, don't feel bad. She's a fairly nominal character in Marvel's vast comics pantheon, but giving her a spotlight in the company's "Cinematic Universe" will bolster her to superstar status, if not quite in the same range as Iron Man and Spider-Man, but certainly becoming as familiar a name as Daredevil or probably even Ant-Man.
Jessica Jones emerged as a product of Marvel's "MAX" line of comics, one that allowed creators a bit more liberty with sex, violence, and language than your average tights-and-capes book. Like the TV show, the comic book (titled
Alias, which could not be used for the Nextflix series for obvious JJ Abrams reasons) is about a private detective with a past as a short-lived superhero. The TV series keeps the relative broad strokes of this story and character intact, including an awkward relationship with Luke Cage, but it forges its own path. Where the comic seemed predestined to be a semi-conventional P.I. TV series, this series forgoes the "case-of-the-week" setup, instead driving forward through its 13-episode order with a stronger, singular thread.
The show finds Jessica haunted by a past trauma, having been held captive by a man named Kilgrave for six months up until he was run over by a bus. Kilgrave had the ability to have anyone do as he wishes by simply telling them what to do, and Jessica was under his every whim, a plaything he professed to love. Time has passed but the scars run deep and now Kilgrave has re-emerged, back from the dead. Jessica is torn between fleeing and hunting the sociopath down. It's only the case of another of Kilgrave's victims, heading to trial for murdering her parents, that gives Jessica the fortitude to fight.
The show does a remarkable job building the threat of Kilgrave over the first three or four episodes, with only hints and occasional visual cues of the man himself. Even once revealed, Kilgrave is easily the scariest villain in a Marvel story to date, and the nastiest predator one could imagine. Kilgrave is given a couple of episodes focus, even a slight moment of redemption, but the show knows well how to toy with its audience. Casting beloved Doctor Who
David Tennent, with his considerable charm, was a brilliant move as he brings that same Doctor charm, but utterly twisted. His backstory is made clear and even provides some sympathy, but the show treads it well, saying that sympathy is not enough. Kilgrave does what he does because he knows no other way, and he's incapable of really trying.
The intention of the show is clear though, this is a story about sexual abuse, domestic violence, and emotional abuse. It's not the specifics that a Law & Order SVU seems to uneasily delight in, but rather the emotional impact that one has both during and after such an incident, as well as the persistent power one's abuser still has even after the abuse has seemingly abated. We wade right into Jessica's post traumatic stress right away, but we find the hero within almost instantly in her willingness to sacrifice her own comfort in order to help a stranger who faces a similar situation.
Kristen Ritter, makes for an unlikely superhero, but a winning flawed protagonist. She captures the attitude, the bitterness, the pain and anger, the desire and drive to do good mixed with the need for self-preservation, it's an award-worthy performance (no doubt to be overlooked because of the genre). She's the lead of the show, 100%, and she earns it every step of the way. She's given a love interest in Luke Cage, with whom she has a complicated back story, and their union is fraught with difficulty (it's uncannily like the story of
Another Earth though I suspect utterly unintentional), but there's definitely something that works, and Ritter and Mike Colter have a crackling energy between them.
The supporting cast is largely great, and their storylines play out almost universally well.
Eka Darville plays Jessica's strung-out neighbour Malcom, who makes a pretty dramatic transition in the series (though it peters out towards the end), and
Rachael Taylor is fantastic as Trish "Patsy" Walker, Jessica's best friend and media personality (Trish is the show's MVP, getting her own very rewarding storyline somewhat independent of Jessica's).
Carrie Anne Moss takes on the role of high-powered lawyer Jeri Hogarth, whose affair with her secretary turns to the messiest of divorce proceedings, all of which gets integrated into the crux of the show's first season, at times awkwardly and at times quite brilliantly.
Like
Daredevil before it, if there's a flaw in Netflix's plan for these Marvel shows it's forcing them into a 13-episode format. Both series start to wear around episode 9, and then have a rough race to the finish. Episode 9 here borders on being a terrible episode in an otherwise great series, starting with a riling-up-the-mob sequence that's straight out of a 1930's Universal Horror movie. The show from thereout loses its tremendous forward thrust as it starts to pad out the episode with more asides for its tertiary characters. I think at 10 episodes
Jessica Jones would have had a perfect run, but as is there's at least two "we got Kilgrave...oh, he's escaped" scenarios too many.
But that's a quibble. It's amazing we now have at least four superhero shows with female showrunners (
Arrow, Peggy Carter, Supergirl, Jessica Jones), and
Melissa Rosenberg manages to acquit herself of writing the Twilight movies quite nicely, showing more of her experience with
Dexter instead by heading another binge-worthy series. Some are calling
Jessica Jones the best Marvel yet, and I can't really agree, since I enjoy the big, brassy, expensive spectacle of the films fart too much, but it's certainly got a case for best drama and best series. Not having piles of history and expectations behind her has its advantages.
It's a fair gripe, as this "medley" is so utterly evident in the first viewing. When the opening title card "Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." pops up, and the opening horn blast from the Star Wars theme erupts, one is faced with the unknown for the first time. With the established "Expanded Universe" of stories from the past 20 years largely discarded, we enter The Force Awakens with no idea about where our beloved characters are in their life, or the events that have happened to them since we last saw them, nor do we have really any insight into who the new cast of characters that have been thrust towards us ad nauseum for well over a years. It's an exciting moment, especially for Star Wars fans. But as the film plays out the sense of familiarity in plotting and structure help ground us in what we know so that all the new seeds planted by director Abrams, and writers Laurence Kasdan and Michael Arndt don't completely overtake us.
The biggest sign of this is in the new characters introduced. While a returning Harrison Ford as Han Solo delivers a game performance in a meaty role (and Chewbacca is at his best here too), eliciting big dumb smiles from Star Wars fans everywhere, he's still outshone (or at least competitively illuminated) by Daisy Ridley as Rey, John Boyega as Finn, and Adam Driver as Kylo Ren (Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron is immediately ingratiating, but just has less to do in the film overall). I can't overstate how amazing these new characters are, and how endearing they become. They are not carbon copies of any characters we've seen in the Star Wars universe prior, and they are perhaps an even better acting ensemble than what we got in the original trilogy. So enamored was I by Rey, Finn, Kylo, Poe, Maz Kanata (an inspired CGI character played by Lupita Nyong'o), General Hux (Domnhall Gleeson), and BB-8 that I'm ready to let go of my desire to see more adventures of Han, Luke, Leia et. al. I want comics and novels starring these new characters far, far more.
There's a lot of questions left standing by the film's end, many having to do with the events of the past 30 years, and more still having to do with the background of the new characters we meet. Even more questions are of the more problematic sort, ones that have you calling into question how things work or how characters do what they do. But for every aspect that may have you furrowing your brow, there's a dozen or more that will have you smiling, cheering or laughing. Abrams delivers on the excitement and affable charm, as well as the incredible intensity and spectacle. Great pains were taken to disseminate what made the original Star Wars work and to repeat that here, it's both obvious and welcome.
For the long time fine, this is a film that demands repeated viewings, at the very least one follow-up watch if only to get past the overwhelming experience of seeing a new Star Wars movie, and allow yourself the experience of soaking up the texture of it. Where repeated viewings of the Prequels seemed to only amplify the tremendous weaknesses in script, performance, story and directing, multiple viewings of The Force Awakens manage to generate increasing goodwill. There hits a point of acceptance of any flaws, favor curried by the good time and pleasing stimulation it provides.
