KsMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching that month (or the month before, as it were) in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.
This Month:
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024, Disney+, 8/8 episodes)
Dune: Prophecy Season 1 (2024, HBOMax, 6/6 episodes)
Black Doves Season 1 (2024, Netflix, 6/6 episodes)
Missing You (2025, Netflix, 5/5 episodes)
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(created by Jon Watts and Christopher Ford)
The What 100: Set shortly after The Mandalorian Season 3, we learn of At Attin (or Aye-Tee-Aye-Tee-Tin if you're nasty) is a 1980's suburb planet hidden from the rest of the Galaxy, unaware of the star war that came and went over the preceding 30 years in continuity. Four pre-teens - Fern, Neel, KB, and Wim find an abandoned ship buried in a culvert, and accidentally trigger it's autopilot, setting off into adventure. They are aided by the pirate robot first mate SM-33 and find a maybe-ally in the maybe-Jedi/definitely pirate Jod Na Nawood. Jod, in aiding the children in a tumultuous Galaxy, has his own objective, to return with them to the mythical At Attin and loot it for all it's worth.
(1 Great) The original Star Wars was a product of George Lucas's varied interests and obsessions, from samurai films and spaghetti westerns to World War II dogfighting epics (are those even a thing?) and 1930's sci-fi serials. Most Star Wars since the new millennium has felt very...indebted to Star Wars, and has shied away from reverential and referential filmmaking. So something like this, a new Star Wars show that has firmly married its visual and storytelling aesthetics on the films of the 1980s, feels, if not fresh, then definitely loved and lived in. Show creators Jon Watts (Spider-Man Homecoming/Far From Home/No Way Home) and Christopher Ford leer their eye particularly toward the Spielbergian Amblin Entertainment films like The Goonies and E.T. but also Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Hook and almost any other junior adventure movie from the era. The designs (clothes, sets, ships, aliens) in the show ring true to Star Wars, but also feel very retro, and it's all somehow fresh-but-familiar. Each episode was full of boundless enthusiasm and energy and never seemed to lose sight of what it was aiming for like other Disney+ Star Wars shows have (especially the ones that started out as film ideas and then were stretched to mini-series length). What a delight this was.
(1 Good) I have to admit I was apprehensive when I heard about a Star Wars show that was aimed at a younger audience and whose protagonists were a band of kids led by Jude Law. The fact that Law was involved lended the project some leeway, but still I was worried that Lucasfilm was going to make a juvenile Star Wars (like Lego Star Wars, but live action) with a lot of silly gags. I also have to admit I didn't know how to feel about the first trailer, which prominently displayed it's "Star Wars suburbs" and its young cast. But the kids, each of them, were terrific. Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) is a daydreamer, wishing for adventure. Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is the tough, rebellious one. KB (Kyriana Kratter) is a cyborg, with special skills but feeling like an outcast. Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) is a gentle, anxious, pacifistic elephant-boy (of the Max Rebo variety). They're all so charming in their own unique ways, and they each have their own arc within the show. The intonation of the first episode is that Wim, the instigator of their adventure, is the show's center, but it balances each of the children very well, such that it's hard to think of any one of them as the single protagonist. And they're all really, really good actors (and very well directed. Watts directed the first and final episode, David Lowrey (The Green Knight) on the second and third episode, the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, Everything, Everywhere All At Once) episode 4, and Bryce Dallas Howard (The Mandalorian) on episode 5.
(1 Bad) The show does such an amazing job of establishing the adventure it's to set out on in the first episode and then delivering a semi-stand-alone adventure each episode, it's a shame then that the penultimate episode then doesn't quite feel so stand-alone. It feels like the first of two parts, like setup for the finale. It's still enjoyable but it doesn't maintain the same punchy, rollicking spirit of discovery that the episodes before had.
META: With this, like many other Star Wars shows, I wish there was a "continuous run" feature without the "previously on" or the title cards or the closing credits. I would be more likely to return to them if I could cut through all the streaming noise... like reading through a collected trade paperback of a comic book series.
Do I want and/or need more Skeleton Crew? No, I don't, even though there are answers to be had (Star Wars has always been full of those, and that's what comics and books are for). This holds together as a stand-alone thing so, so well. Would it have worked better as a film? It's possible but then we would have been robbed of some of the adventures they do have, and I think Neel and KB's arcs would probably have been scaled back. Super fun time.
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(created by Diane Ademu-John, Alison Schapker)
The What 100: Set in the same universe as Denis Villeneuve's recent duology (Duneology?), Dune: Prophecy takes place 10,000 years earlier, just after the great civil war with artificial intelligence. The monarchy's rule is tenuous, and equally tenuous is the establishment of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood as sacred aides and advisors to all the great houses of the Galaxy. Valya Harkonnen is Mother Superior of the third generation of Bene Gesserit, and the series looks at what got her there, and her upholding and furthering of the slow-burn machinations of the sisterhood for the next 100 centuries. But, from the spice-laden sands of Arrakis comes a warrior who is very much interested in interfering with those plans and burning down the sisterhood altogether.
(1 Great) The production values on Dune: Prophecy are outstanding. Although I'm sure they may have, I wasn't noticing any of the seams where they may have cut corners. The sets are absolutely stunning, the wardrobes are exceptionally tailored, and the look and feel of the show fits with what Villeneuve and company were doing. The art direction, anything requiring designs are so expertly crafted as to feel of a place with with Dune and Dune Part 2 but also feel like they're from a time much earlier (maybe they didn't quite succeed at making it feel 10,000 years earlier, but it's more than enough to distinguish itself as another time period). I loved looking at this show.
(1 Good) There are some warts that give it a bumpy texture, but overall, Prophecy delivers quite a compelling tale about the women behind the power, and in fact are angling to eventually have complete power. This takes perseverance, but also sacrifice, and cold, cold blood in your veins. Emily Watson is superb as Mother Superior Valya whose claim to her title (and the tactics she teaches) is formed from old wounds that have not healed and are threatening to rip right open again. At the same Reverend Mother Tula Harkonnen (Olivia Williams), Valya's sister, and right-hand aide, finds herself at a crossroads between blindly obeying and seeking her own path which threatens to spill the secrets of the sisterhood out wide. I found all of this intrigue within the sisterhood so, so fascinating... and then the layers of which what was happening within the sisterhood spilled out into their plotting in the greater galaxy just started dogpiling on each other with such intricacy I couldn't help but be impressed how tightly the show weaved together its seemingly disparate elements.
(1 Bad) Even at 6 episodes (six long episodes, most over an hour in length, uninterrupted) Prophecy at times could feel like it was stalling, filling time, spending time with characters and scenarios that were already inferred, or in some cases were just extrapolating on previous information. The flashbacks for Valya and Tula eat up some hefty chunks of screentime, and much of it is covered through exposition or retreaded multiple times over from different vantage points to provide additional nuance or context. The flashbacks especially impede the pacing of the show, and at one point I was almost completely checked out. That said, it all comes around.
META: I though it was pretty savvy to explore a post-AI world, like immediately following the outlaw of robots and computer-assisted, well, everything. It doesn't act, really, as a cautionary tale, and, in fact, at times, seems to think it might be an overreaction to completely cut it out of human existence altogether. It doesn't successfully show us what that transition would look like, what the chaos would be. But then, this is a reality where the galaxy is ruled by "great houses" with a pretty severe grasp, and a religious sect of witches is making a power play for control of it all, so it's not able to really get into any modern-day analogs (which is probably for the best, yet, it could be soooo easy to do, but would probably age poorly if it tried to be so direct.
I thought this was going to be a stand-alone mini-series, 6 episodes and done... alas it is not. Although based on the Kevin J. Anderson/Brian Herbert novel "Sisterhood of Dune", which is part of a larger series "the Great Schools of Dune", it's only a loose adaptation (a quick scan of the book reveals they're pretty much two different stories with different characters altogether). I thought because it's so expensive-looking that it would be only this on mini-series in case they had to cut and run, but nope, it's not conclusive in its finale and it was pretty immediately renewed for a second season.
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(created by Joe Barton [The Lazarus Project])
The What 100: Helen (Keira Knightley), the wife of the UK Secretary of State for Defence, learns that her secret lover, an MI-5 agent, has been killed in the line of duty under mysterious circumstances. Helen herself is a secret agent, but for a neutral, for-profit mercenary organization called the Black Doves. Helen can't help but think, given her lover's last phone call to her, that his death is connected to her somehow. Her minder, Reed (Sarah Lancashire), calls in Sam (Ben Whishaw), an old friend and fixer, to keep an eye on her. What they find, the more they dig may be fatal for them and take the Doves down with them.
(1 Great) I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much, but this wound up being a tight and satisfying binge. It adeptly juggled many different narratives that criss-crossed in a way that felt like a savvy mix of your standard espionage series and your standard procedural series, forming an above-average version of either. I enjoyed the process of discovery within the show where things were rarely as they seemed and the show deftly showed you enough to lead you to certain conclusions. But also, it never felt like a cheat when they revealed the truth (or something closer to the truth), because the characters were experiencing the same thing. It was hard as the audience to get ahead of the show when it was misdirecting you and the characters at the same time.
(1 Good) I've never been a big fan of Knightley, nor have I ever really disliked her, but she was never a draw for me for any project. After a few years away from the spotlight she's come back not in a prestige drama, or a "recapturing the past" romcom, or a big paycheck revival of some IP...no, she's come back in a series that lets her do a little bit of everything. There's some rich drama here for her to chew on as an undercover wife but loving mother with emotional ties outside of her job (which has become her life), but she also gets to be funny, quippy and have fun in the role. She gets to do some action set pieces, get all bloodied up, and she genuinely seems to be having a blast in the role. Helen is often the smartest person in the room, and has to play down that fact, and Knightley manages that trick particularly well.
(1 Bad) Like Dune: Prophecy there are flashbacks here that eat into the runtime of the series, but not quite as egregiously, and they seem to cohere to the story better...probably because they're pretty brief and don't take up so much real estate. I think with Prophecy, the central story is the intriguing part, and the Harkonnen sisters are maybe the standout characters of the ensemble, they're just part of the ensemble. Here, it's a character-driven story, so when we flash back to Helen or Sam's past, as are our lead characters the flashbacks are providing very important and specific context to them. Episode 2 spends a lot of time with Helen's history with the Doves establishing her history with Sam, and then episode 3 fills in some of the gaps of Sam's "London troubles" but leaving a lot open to be explored in the series.
META: I have to think that this is a response to the success of recent streaming spy series like Slow Horses, The Recruit, and The Diplomat. It seems to be a genre that is faring well for Netflix and so I imagine we'll be seeing more of these types of shows this year and next, in increasing volume until we get sick of it and Netflix nixes them all.
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(developed by Victoria Asare-Archer)
The What 100: Detective Kat Donovan is still reeling from two events in her life: 1) the murder of her father, also a police detective, and 2) the sudden ghosting from her fiancee, Josh, 11 years ago. The man charged with killing her father is dying of cancer and Kat finds out, through illegal means, that he didn't actually kill her dad. And then she matches with Josh on a dating app, only for him to ghost her again. Meanwhile she's investigating a case of a missing man which may or may not have something to do with either of the above. Kat can't rest until she figures it all out.
(1 Great) Rosalind Eleazar may be the third or fourth major player on AppleTV+'s Slow Horses but she's an exceptionally engaging presence on that show and I wanted to see how she would handle being the lead. Turns out she's just as exceptionally engaging when she's the primary figure on screen, most of the time. Too bad it's such a dogshit story she's been saddled with.
(1 Good) I really struggle with saying anything good about this show. Midway through episode 2, Lady Kent and I acknowledged that the show was decidedly terrible and actively began hatewatching it by episode 3. Hatewatching something is its own experience which can be good, especially when you have someone with you on the same wavelength, and we had a good time being outraged by all the horrible aspects of the show... most of which I actively blocked out of my brain a mere 3 weeks later.
(1 Bad) This story is terrible. It overburdens the lead characters with too much drama, much of it in the sphere of highly unbelievable territory, and then starts weaving her active investigation into these two very personal drama's she's involved in (though it only actually connects tangentially to one of them). The more the story starts unravelling it's mystery, the worse it gets. The show crafts a villain out of Steve Pemberton (who I only know from a recent season of Taskmaster) and he's the dollar store version of a James Bond villian. If you've read or heard at all about Pig Butchering romance scams, this operation Pemberton is running is fucking ludicrous. The music was noticeably bad and at times the way the camera or the show would deceive the audience through framing, shadows or misrepresentation borders on camp (if only it were camp). It's a bad, bad show.
META: This is the latest entry (#8!) in Netflix's massive, multi-year, multi-program deal with writer Harlan Coben, adapting his novels into movies and TV shows. Good on Coben for getting that paper...but holy shit was this an awful story, to the point that I'm never watching (or reading) anything with Coben's name associated with it. Just yuk.
Not currently writing about TV, so might as well comment :)
ReplyDeleteI was surprised at how much I enjoyed watching Skeleton Crew, considering my usual distaste for annoying kids, and booooy was Wim an annoying self-important brat of a kid. Luckily his "friends" pulled things up for him. I agree with your comments on referential material; I think the whole show just looked good, but I have always liked the gritty, decaying, clunky side of Star Wars.
We absolutely loved Black Doves, especially how it played with the spy show tropes. The characters were just so unexpected. And I loved every moment of Whishaw on the screen, including the hard moments. And the pair of assassins who they just have to tolerate working with were just .... adorable sociopaths !
Haven't watched DuneTV yet --- I cannot help but feel I will end up comparing it to Foundation.
I never heard of Harlan Coben before we watched Shelter and we were incredibly wishy washy about that one, which was during my last period of "not writing about TV". He felt like an author mostly familiar with YA stuff but .... writing it for adults? I recall feeling it just never really went anywhere.