K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (eh..?) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format. The last post was getting pretty long, so I broke it into 2 parts (why haven't I thought to do that before?).
Also This Month:
The Haunting of Hill House (2018, Netflix, 10/10 episodes) Creator: Mike Flanagan
The Franchise (2024, HBO max, 8/8 episodes) Creator: Jon Brown
Interior Chinatown (2024, Disney+, 10/10 episodes) Creator: Charles Yu
A Man on the Inside (2024, Neftlix, 8/8 episodes) Creator: Michael Schur
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The Haunting of Hill House
The What 100: The Crain family moved into Hill House for a few months in the early '90's with the intent of renovating it and flipping it for a wild profit. What they didn't know but would soon enough learn, is the house was not only haunted, but some kind of place of holding for the afterlife. In the present day, the surviving members of the Crain family are still processing what they went through in their younger life, some in denial, some willfully ignoring, and some trying to forget. But Hill House isn't done with them yet.
(1 Great): Unlike Midnight Mass, which came out of the gate with one of the best first episodes since Lost, The Haunting of Hill House was a much slower burn. It took about three episodes before I settled into the rhythm of the series as each of the first five episodes dedicated its focus to one of the five Crain children. The absolute best of these was episode five, which follows the youngest sibling Nell through her childhood traumas, and simultaneously explains her mindest as she got older. Her family never really understood her, and the previous four episodes painted a very different picture of Nell than what we get here. It's a devastating, beautiful, clever, and horrifying episode that builds so well off of what we were shown before.
(1 Good): The way in which the series jumps back and forth in time is largely a subject of point of view, and as such the truth of what is happening both in the past and in the present unfolds as a result of the shifting points of view. The result is a series that keeps peeling layers off episode after episode, and although it takes a couple episodes to really get going, it does fully sink you into those layers. As usual, Flanagan takes his conceits of ghosts and psychic connections and builds a very human world around it, zeroing in on characters and their relationships to one another, and that becomes as much, if not more what's worth sinking into that the questions of what happened (both past and present). The sixth episode, taking place at Shirley's funeral home, brings the family together with their estranged father for the first time in a very long time, and it's a doozy of an emotional roller coaster from airing of grievances, but also has plenty of enticingly creepy moments. It's like the first four episodes culminate in Episode 5, the events of which gives way for Episode 6 which acts as the slingshot that propels the series forward over the next four episodes.
(1 Bad): I could harp on Flanagan's penchant for monologues, but it's just something he clearly likes to do and his audience either needs to get over it or just move on from his work. I'm really not ready to do either. But I think for me the least enjoyable part of the series was the Dudleys (Annabeth Gish and Robert Longstreet), whose family were the longtime caretakers of Hill House. They were such background characters whose presence never much made sense to me. I guess I just am not familiar with such a concept of estate caretakers. I felt like they either should have been incorporated more, or excised completely. A lot of their presence in the show did seem extraneous and when we finally get their story, also quite tragic, it felt very deus ex machina.
META: Were I to hazard a guess, just looking at the timing, Flanagan was working on The Haunting of Hill House at the same time as he was working on the adaptation of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, and the influence of Doctor Sleep really shows. In many ways you could easily tie Hill House into the same universe that Doctor Sleep inhabits. Theo has a psychic ability (as did her mother) which could just be the Shining. The way that Flanagan employs ghosts is very similar to how they are employed in Doctor Sleep, and Hill House has a very similar vibe to the Overlook Hotel, and the way that Flanagan explains the Overlook in Doctor Sleep as almost a living entity is so similar here. Flanagan does tweak the concepts enough to not make the connection fully work, but it seems very much like Flanagan was enamoured with the ideas within Doctor Sleep and just wanted to play with them in a totally different context. Fair enough.
Flanagan's stable of performers are present, but it was the younger cast that impressed me, and shocked me with how many familiar young faces there were. Julian Hilliard who played young Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen played older Luke) was Tommy in Wandavision. Violet McGraw played young Nell (played by Victoria Pedretti in her older form) was also young Yelena in Black Widow and was in M3GAN and Doctor Sleep. And of course McKenna Grace playing young Theo (played in her older self by Kate Siegel) is one of the standout performers of the entire Hill House series and is also the star of the modern Ghostbusters franchise. The young-old casting was uniformly great, and I especially liked how patriarch Hugh Crain was played so consistently by Henry Thomas and Timothy Hutton...it was a real performance in tandem.
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The Franchise
Created by Jon Brown
(1 Great): You can't go wrong, I think ever, with Richard E. Grant, who plays an egocentric thespian who is too good for the material he's working with (but not too good for the money he's getting paid). He's largely background colour, but he pops every time he's on screen, as he is wont to do.
(1 Good): There are a few other great secondary character that are just joke machines, including Lolly Adefope as Dag, Daniel's Second A.D. (she really doesn't give a shit about any of it, but is ready to work her way up the ladder), Billy Magnussen as the heroic lead of Tecto:Eye of the Storm, Adam Randolph (whose ego is the thinnest sheet of glass, standing precariously on its edge), and Darren Goldstein's studio exec Pat Shannon (just swinging big dick energy everywhere, and teeters so close to reprehensible but comes out as one of the series' brightest spots). But the series doesn't work at all without Patel shouldering the whole thing, and, let's face it, the guy is a star, and he does carry the whole thing on his back. He's likeable, vulnerable, but also flawed, and Patel has to do so much hiding of the character's true self putting on a different face for each of the other characters, with only spare moments to let his guard down and reveal the sensitive family man and old-school comic book nerd with ambitions and desires of his own.
(1 Bad): I enjoyed a lot of The Franchise but as a whole it just didn't fully click with me. I wondered, as a fan of the MCU (still) whether I was just being a sensitive fanboy at the jokes it was clearly making at its expense. But no, I'm not that sensitive a fanboy, and I liked a lot of those jokes. Largely I think this series --in exposing franchise filmmaking as a rather callous cold-hearted, profit-centric machine -- is missing exactly what it needs, which is heart. The people in this production largely don't care about what they're doing, and they don't care about each other, and that makes it hard as an audience member to care about it all as well.
META: I can honestly say that any of the satire and lampooning of franchise filmmaking here is probably pretty accurate, if exaggerated, but this series isn't made with love, it is full on a barbed critique. It's a series that clearly dislikes the whole franchise filmmaking venture, and thinks of it as an entirely miserable experience for all, from start to finish. There's next to no room here for affection, with only the slightest glimmer of it in Patel's character, but its not put in front of the audience enough to care.
It's also really hard to give us a 200 million dollar movie in a show whose operating budget is a small fraction of that. Tecto looks like an off-brand superhero movie from the '90's and doesn't ever feel like something that could even remotely be a successful movie.
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Interior Chinatown
Created by Charles Yu
(1 Great): This show is a trip. A legit trip. The premise, if not clear above, is that Willis is a background characters in a Law & Order-style TV series set in the late 1990s. The show blurs the line between its interior reality and the reality of a TV show as to be somewhat indistinguishable except that there are very blurry dividing lines between the two. There are times where the characters in a scene transition seemlessly into the background (and sometimes the foreground) of a commercial break, promoting a hard seltzer or stylish watch then resuming conversations. The visuals will often cut to a television set which then shows characters from the reality of Interior Chinatown as characters within Black & White or a commercial or something else. It is the wildest series I've watched since Mrs. Davis, another show which obfuscates its reality quite adeptly.
(1 Good): I particularly loved how it flipped the dynamic of the background characters being the foreground protagonist and pushing the two detective characters into flimsy archetypes. But the reality of these characters, and other characters, whether lead or background, all start to shift as Willis starts infiltrating spaces he's not otherwise meant to be. There are "awakenings" in a way, where the extras, or single-line supporting players start to find a voice within their reality, and my favourite exploration of this was with the Black & White leads, Detectives Miles Turner (Sullivan Jones, a complete unknown to me but comes alive in the series second half) and Sarah Green (Lisa Gilroy, who I know only from the Comedy Bang Bang podcast but really breaks out here). Turner starts to question everything about his surroundings, and eventually just breaks free of them, while Green wants nothing more than to embrace everything about her trappings, to succeed, but she can't stand the cost of doing so.
(1 Bad): There wasn't really anything bad about this show. I was invested from moment one, and continued to be absolutely glued to every moment of the show as it played out. But if there was a critique, it would be that the main characters, Willis, his best friend Fatty (the always sarcastic and enjoyable Ronny Chieng, Shang-Chi), his mother Lily (a soulful performance from Diana Lin) and even Bennett's Detective Lana Lee all spend so much time apart from one another in their own story lines. Willis' distance from these other characters all has narrative context, and metanarrative context, and it's employed quite well. The disparate threads do all come together in the final episodes quite successfully, so I can't complain too much, except that I liked Yang and Chieng's dynamic together (with Chau Long's sweet doofus Carl as an interloping third in the duo).
META: It's all very, very meta. The narrative is clearly the lack of representation of Chinese Americans in American television and cinema. There's a total lack of respect, and a total disinterest in the mainstream to telling their stories, and letting them tell their stories. The narrative drive here is Willis taking ownership of his story, of exposing the systemic racism that has been holding him down, and along the way commenting on how, even outside of the entertainment industry the immigrant populaces are either ignored or targeted for displacement via gentrification, their culture subverted by the whims of capitalism. It's a damn enjoyable series for its unique weirdness, but it's so much the better for having the underpinning of cultural criticism.
I freaking loved this show. One of my favourites of the year.
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A Man on the Inside
Created by Michael Schur (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place)
(1 Great): Fucking Ted Danson, man. The guy has been at it on television for almost 50 years and in the past five or so years he's just hit his peak. The Good Place gave him the best role of his career, but with A Man on the Inside he's at his most soulful and vulnerable.
Danson plays Charles as a man carrying deep pain but incapable of addressing it. His wife had dementia and died suddenly from complications, and the experience was traumatic for him, but he didn't know how to process it. So he floats, navigating his daily routine that offers little surprise but little possibility for hurt either. In taking the job with Julie and coming to Pacific View, he doesn't just find work and purpose, though, instead he finds a community of contemporaries, and connections to people and passions and memories and experiences that awaken him from his fugue state. The work forces him out of his protective shell and in inquiring into other people's lives it opens him up to sharing his life back, and finding the pain he experienced is not unique. Danson sells the stoic nature of Charles, the giddiness of playing spy, the tenderness he has with a Pacific View patient with early signs of dementia, and ultimately opening up and connecting with his daughter Emily (in an episode where Charles visits Emily and her family following a loss at the retirement home, it finds Charles playing video games with his three grandsons and breaks down in that moment...it's both beautiful and devastating, and one of Danson's best-ever performances that makes me cry just thinking about it).
(1 Good): Brooklyn Nine-Nine veteran Stephanie Beatrix plays Didi, the manager of Pacific View. The first few episodes Didi is a very peripheral character, which seemed odd given Beatrix's core cast role in Schur's previous series. At first Didi seems suspicious of Charles' behaviour, and it seems like its setting something up, but by the end of the third episode Didi has locked her suspicions away, like Schur was pivoting on what his initial intent for the series was (from this odd detective comedy series, to longer form sitcom in a retirement home), But Didi gets a spotlight episode just past midway through the run which demands a lot from Beatrix, and she delivers so powerfully as a woman who cares for people, even within a corporate structure that really only cares about money. It's leadership, and forming a team of people who follow that leadership, it's not just a job. And when Charles is eventually outed, the hurt from the deceit is experienced by many, but it is Didi who is the most devastated by it, and Beatrix makes you feel that so deeply, even though you are sympathetic to Charles. His intent was never to hurt anyone, but it happened despite the best intentions.
(1 Bad): No bad here. A little wonkiness in the episode-to-episode consistency. I don't know if it was the series who had unsteady legs, or if it was just me as a view and the expectations of what I thought the plan for the series was. It's not a conventional narrative, and Schur uses Netflix and its lack of ad breaks to play around with TV sitcom structure in a way that doesn't always work fully, but never actually fails to deliver the showrunner's intent. I think the most awkward part of the series was the cutaways to Emily and her family, which seemed so outside the narrative of the rest of the show. And yet, Lady Kent and I felt so seen by modern parenting, and the way kids behave so distinctly from the way we behaved, it's hard to say it shouldn't belong (even if it could maybe be a whole other series). These moments with Emily and family are especially important though for when we get to that powerful scene of Charles with his grandsons. I don't think it would have worked half as powerfully if we hadn't gotten to know these kids before hand.
META: Strangely Michael Schur's first, and probably biggest success was The Office, a show I cannot tolerate to watch. I've tried, twice, and I find it unpalatable. Parks & Recreation on the other hand, after it ditched its Office clone vibes, became one of my all-time favourite comedy series. And everything Schur has done since then has been right up my alley. There are few other comedy creators that I trust as much as him, because his track record has proven himself (Bill Lawrence, maybe? Tina Fey and Robert Carlock possibly). And A Man on the Inside makes good on that trust, and shows how Schur continues to evolve as a creator. His interests are of a deep and curious nature as to different facets of human existence. In this case he's looking at people in the final years of their life who are in an establishment that, perhaps, people see as a place where they go so they can be ignored and forgotten about. A Man on the Inside shows there's still vitality there, a need for connection as much, if not more than a need for care. In some cases these are places where people where "put", but the point here is that for some it's a chosen place, a home and community where there's new shared experiences and connections. It's really quite beautiful.
Another of my favourites this year.
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