(Not the) Best and Worst of Streaming Series, July-December 2022

 

This is the first in a series of posts looking back at film and television in 2022.

Remember those glorious days of old when you could count the number of existing television networks on one hand, and premium cable was limited to HBO, Showtime and Cinemax? How quaint and long ago those days now seem... and how much easier it was then for one person to compile an authoritative list of the best series of the year. 

With the explosive proliferation of streaming channels and series nowadays, it's impossible for me to watch it all and supremely challenging to get to even a significant percentage of it. I can't honestly do much but pass on my recommendations and admonitions regarding the small subset of programs I actually managed to watch. 

Not that I don't make an effort. I've already published my thoughts about a number of streaming series that aired in the first half of 2022. (You can read them here.) What follows are my thoughts about programs that have aired since July 1. 

One other thing..

If there's an overriding theme here, it's that almost all the really good shows aired in the first half of the year. It was slim picking's from July on, but I did my best...

A Little Better than Expected: Welcome to Chippendale's (Hulu)

I fully expected a series about the infamous male strip club franchise to be good, campy fun and not much else. And  Welcome to Chippendale's does intermittently provide that kind of bawdy amusement. But there's a bit more, including a 'true crime' element of which I was completely ignorant when coming to the series.

Kumail Nanjiani turns in a stellar performance as Steve Banerjee, the Indian immigrant who went from managing a small gas station to owning the Chippendale's franchise to arranging the murder of his business partner. Nanjiami has described the visual image that guided his portrayal as "a block of ice with a tiny flame inside it," and he impressively plays to that idea. His Banerjee is a buttoned-up, calculating, humorless pillar of repressed rage, sensitive to the slights and prejudice he endures as a brown-skinned man in America but all too ready to inflict the same slights on black employees and customers he believes will make Chippendales "less classy" in the eyes of his predominantly white clientele. 

Murray Bartlett's hilarious, irrepressible performance as Nick DeNoia (the club-choreographer-turned-face-of-Chippendale's) is the perfect foil to Nanjiani's grumpy number-cruncher. The "Dr. Hunkenstein" production number his character stages is just about Broadway-worthy. Anna Leigh Ashford, Juliette Lewis, Andrew Rannells, Robin De Jesus and Quentin Plair round out an excellent cast of supporting players.

But despite that cast, Welcome to Chippendales ultimately offers little more in the way of story or revelations that you could find in a television documentary on the subject - and most of those are on Hulu, too. In fact, you might want to skip the series finale altogether and just Google the details of Banerjee's downfall. That is, unless you'd really rather watch the hokey scene where Banerjee is visited in prison by the Jacob Marley-esque ghost of his dead colleague.

Less Bad Than I Expected: Harry and Meghan (Netflix)

Yes I watched all six hours. And yes, I cringed and rolled my eyes more that a few times.

Unfortunately I can't un-see these two doing their affirming guided meditation together, their eyes shut and brows photogenically furrowed as they remind themselves that all the negativity coming at them isn't about who they really are,. (For the record, I have nothing against self-affirming guided meditations - I've done them myself to great personal benefit. But nothing on heaven or earth would induce me to film myself in the act and then put it on Netflix.)

Then there is the scene where Meghan demonstrates the exaggerated, bizarrely theatrical curtsy she made to the Queen on their first meeting. Even Harry looks embarrassed. And that's before we get a glimpse of the fabulous California mansion that Tyler Perry loaned them. 

But here's the most important takeaway: this series makes some legitimate, well-documented, and extremely damning claims of racism against both the British press AND the monarchy. The media references to Harry's "gangsta" girlfriend who's "almost straight out of Compton" are only the tip of the iceberg. There's a segment in which news stories about the former Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex are shown side by side.  Where Kate is praised and celebrated for certain innocuous behaviors (eating avocados while pregnant, fondling her baby bump in public), Meghan is mocked and excoriated for doing exactly the same things! "If  you can't see the racism... then I can't help you," Harry tells us. He's absolutely right.

When Meghan's naivete and over-earnestness morph into entitled whining, it's tempting to tune her out entirely. But in other moments she speaks convincingly uncomfortable truths about the coldness and prejudices of the British ruling class and its many slavishly sycophantic enablers.  Harry's late mother did virtually the same thing in her time, and we effectively beatified her for that. But she was an aristocratic white woman. When an American woman of color speaks out, it's a whole different ballgame. 

Sophomore Slump: Only Murders in the Building (Hulu); 

You know what depresses me the most about writing this entry? It's that I can still remember specific details, lines and scenes from this show's first season (and with great pleasure, I might add), while all I can recall of the second season is that it was a convoluted muddle of new characters and plot complications, including some kerfuffle about whether Martin Short's son was really his son.  Also there was a guest appearance by Shirley MacLaine. It gives me no pleasure to report that the sophomore season of Only Murders in the Building was entirely too much of a formerly good thing; however I have high hopes for the third season as teased in the final episode. Paul Rudd is joining the cast! That can't not be a good thing.

Fifth-season Fumble, Part 1: The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu)

I'm so freaking tired of seeing Elizabeth Moss make this face...

A little refresher: The Handmaid's Tale is based on a Margaret Atwood novel. The first season, which debuted in 2017, covered that novel in its entirety, and if they'd ended the series there, it would be forever remembered as a classic. But the intervening seasons have been made up from scratch in a room full of television writers who tend to fall back on torture porn or scenes of visually stunning, Nazi-esque public ceremonies when they can't come up with a plausible plot development. The show definitively jumped the shark in Season 3, right around the time that Atwood published her acclaimed sequel, The Testaments. By the end of season 4, with June's escape to Canada and the cathartic murder of Commander Waterford by a gang of former handmaids, we seemed to be back on track. And this season started strong enough, but then...

While it's been satisfying to see Serena reduced to handmaid status in the household of a Gilead-loving Canadian couple, this season has mostly been just another exhausting round of repeated physical and emotional torture for its major players. (With lots more opportunities for Elizabeth Moss to make her Righteous Fury Face; see above.) I still don't know whether Bradley Whitford's Commander Lawrence is an evil man, a savior, or just a straight-up lunatic; whichever is the case, his crazy-ass line readings are the highlights of every episode.  I'm thankful that next season will be the last, and that the story is finally transitioning towards the plot  of The Testaments (to which Hulu also bought the rights). But Season 6 has a long way to go to redeem itself and take us out on a hopeful note.

Fifth-season Fumble, Part 2: The Crown (Netflix)

After four spectacular seasons, The Crown has hit a bump in the road.

That's partly due to the extreme overfamiliarity of its story lines around Charles and Diana. That icky phone call where Charles told Camilla he'd like to be her tampon takes up about half of one episode. Or Diana's infamous interview with Martin Bashir, which effectively ended her marriage and ensured her exile from the royal family - that's another whole episode. We've seen it all before (repeatedly, in near-nauseating detail) and there's precious little in the way of new insight or thoughtful re-interpretation to be found here. Dominic West neither looks nor sounds like Charles, although Elizabeth Debicki gives last season's Emma Corrin very strong competition for Best Ever Impersonation of  Princess Diana. Like Corrin, both her physical resemblance to the late princess and her meticulous recreation of Diana's mannerisms are uncanny.

But the worst thing that could have happened to The Crown was the death of Elizabeth II, just weeks before the new season debuted. By unfortunate coincidence, Season 5 is all about the scandal-ridden decline of the monarchy in the mid 1990s and carries with it an elegiac sense of  glory days passing into oblivion.  It all too neatly parallels with the current day feeling that the end of Elizabeth's reign  signals a similar passing away of glory. The son who ascended to the throne at her death is far less beloved, thought to be whiny, self-centered and out of touch by many Britons. Not to mention there's been a fresh round of family scandals with Harry and Meghan's departure, plus Andrew's disgraceful connection to Jeffrey Epstein. With Elizabeth gone, the events of  The Crown - even those that don't directly involve Charles or Diana - feel like very old, entirely irrelevant news.

Nevertheless, Peter Morgan  dutifully trots out a new set of metaphors for monarchical decline, finally eschewing his overreliance on dying stags as symbols for doomed royals. They've been replaced by both the disintegrating royal yacht Britannia (whose repairs will not be paid for by British taxpayers, the Prime Minister insists) and the ancient, unfixable television in Buckingham Palace. "Even the televisions are metaphors," the Queen actually says out loud at one point, apparently for the ten or so viewers who haven't already figured that out.

The production values, of course, remain high, and the acting is predictably impeccable. This season gives us no less than Imelda Staunton, Jonathan Pryce and Leslie Manville in the cast, plus the aforementioned West and Debicki. (Not to be forgotten: Johnny Lee Miller's John Major and Olivia Williams' Camilla, both superb portrayals that haven't received their fair share of the kudos.). But at this point, the show's momentum is irretrievably slowed. It's pretty obvious that the final season is going to kick off with Diana's death, which is a low point from which it may not recover.  

The Ones I Didn't Finish: Mammals (Amazon Prime), Dahmer (Netflix)

In Mammals, James Corden is a chef married to a beautiful French woman whom he discovers is cheating on him with several other men.  The fact that  the couple's "meet cute" scene involves Corden letting off a particularly foul-smelling fart in a small elevator probably goes a long towards explaining how he ended up in that predicament. The Guardian accurately described Corden's character as a "loutish, shouty man-baby," and there's only so much you can stand to watch of a character like that. The brilliant Sally Hawkins is totally wasted in a supporting role as his eccentric, Coco Chanel-obsessed sister.

The one and only reason I ever tried to watch Dahmer was for Richard Jenkins who plays the notorious cannibal's father. And Jenkins did deliver one masterfully heartbreaking scene in the first episode, but that wasn't reason enough for me to stick around past the next one. Dahmer is an oppressively sick and creepy drama, despite its not showing us a single second of gore (in those first two episodes anyway.) And that's not entirely surprising given that it comes to us from Ryan Murphy, a man unacquainted with the concepts of subtlety or restraint.  I know true crime dramas are all the rage these days, but this particular story is just too sad and lurid to bear close examination.  Kudos to Even Peters for really nailing that Milwaukee accent in the title role, but that's not a reason to watch.

The One I Wish I Hadn't Finished: Inside Man (Netflix)

Speaking of lurid..

In this one, David Tenant plays a seemingly nice, intelligent vicar. One Sunday after worship service, his assistant rushes into his office, brandishing a flash drive and (literally!) crying  "Vicar, can you hide my porn?!" Seems the assistant has a problem and his nosy mother is all up in it. So the vicar takes the flash drive and agrees to stash it somewhere safe. But unbeknownst to him, that flash drive is loaded with pictures of children being sexually abused. 

There's a quick and careless kerfuffle when the vicar's son gives his math tutor the flash drive to copy some files from her laptop. The math tutor finds the pictures, the vicar can't explain them without exposing his assistant, and so he does the only thing a nice, reasonable man of the cloth could do in such a moment: he knocks the math tutor down the stairs to his basement and locks her in. And things get MUCH worse from there...

Meanwhile, in a parallel plot thread, Stanley Tucci plays a death row murderer with the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes. We see people visiting him in prison to ask for his insights into unsolved crimes. Tucci listens impassively, then doles out cryptic crumbs of guidance with an inscrutable calm. He's like the Dalai Lama of cold cases. Or maybe just an emotionally dead sociopath. Honestly, it's hard to tell. I'm not entirely sure that even Tucci knew what he was playing here, and I'm one of the actor's biggest fans. 

Eventually, of course, Tucci and Tenant's story lines cross and let's just say, Tucci's character delivers the show's defining message: "Everyone's a murderer. You just need a good reason and a bad day." Eek! Lots of great talent here, both in front of the camera and behind it (the series was created by Steven Moffat, who also created Sherlock), but I felt like I needed a long shower afterwards.

Can't Decide if I Liked It or Hated It: Fleishman is in Trouble (Hulu)

This series (adapted by Taffy Brodesser-Akner from her own novel) consists of five decreasingly satisfying episodes, followed by one absolutely brilliant episode, which is then followed by a not entirely satisfying conclusion. 

 

I cant' imagine I've enticed anyone to watch this, based on that description. But if you do, I think you'll find the alternative title (suggested by a commenter on a Vulture recap) to be painfully appropriate: The Jesse Eisenberg Misery Hour.

Eisenberg here is at his absolute Jesse Eisenberg-iest as Dr. Toby Fleishman, whose high-powered executive wife, Rachel (Clare Danes) walks out on him and their two kids without no explanation and no forwarding address. He leans into every one of his trademark mannerisms: deeply furrowed brow, hunched shoulders, stammering and sputtering through his lines with a palpable anxiety he's desperately trying to contain. His character gets less and less sympathetic as the weeks pass, and by the final episode, I'd written him off as a clueless, self-absorbed prick. 

Toby's story is narrated throughout by a college friend (Lizzy Caplan) whose dreams of becoming a great writer have been subsumed by suburban marriage and motherhood. She's an infinitely more sympathetic character, although her own denouement is similarly unsatisfying.

For five weeks, I tuned into new episodes out of habit, with an ever decreasing investment in the story. But in the penultimate episode, it took a sudden U-turn, showing us the previously related events from the women's point of view. Suddenly, a modestly engrossing series became electrifying.  And the credit for that goes to Danes, whose breathtakingly brave performance saves the day. To this point, Rachel had been the villainess, conveniently kept mostly offscreen so Toby could wallow in self-pitying speculation about her motives. When the truth of her character is finally revealed, it's heartbreaking and devastating. If Danes doesn't get an Emmy for this, then an Emmy is not worth having. Even so, it's kind of a long slog to get to this payoff, and I'm only intermittently convinced it was worth it.

The Best Streaming Series of 2022: The White Lotus, Season 2 (HBO Max)

It's been at least twenty years since anyone used the phrase "watercooler show," but this season of The While Lotus was far and away the 21st century equivalent of that kind of popularity behemoth.  (Note to youngsters: Google that phrase if you're not familiar with it.) Recap on New York Magazine's culture website, Vulture, each received close to 600 comments, as viewers swapped their feverish speculation on how the season would end.

Here's the already well-established template for a season of The White Lotus: the initial episode opens with the discovery of dead body whose identity we don't get to see. Then we immediately flash back one week to the arrival of a new group of guests to a luxury resort in the fictional White Lotus chain (this time in Sicily, shot on location and absolutely gorgeous.) Over the subsequent episodes, we get to explore the shifting, complex personal relationships among those guests while building to the revelation of who died and how.

On its face, that template sounds like a cheesy mash-up of Fantasy Island and Agatha Christie - and it could be if anyone other than Mike White had written and directed. But White is the master of cringey, class-conflict comedy. (apologies for the excessive alliteration) And, as he did in films like Beatriz at Dinner and Brad's Status, White uses this setup to eviscerate the moneyed class while subtly but unsparingly examining their relationship to the people who serve them.  In Season 2, however, the class conflict mostly simmers around the edges while White digs into the problematic marriages and romances of all its characters. In another departure from the first season, the buildup to the demise of the guest who's found floating in the sea as the story opens is skillfully and tantalizingly executed in almost Hitchcockian style. 

The resort guest with the worst marriage here is, unquestionably, Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) the pathologically needy heiress who is the only character held over from Season 1. She's now married to her season one fling, Greg, who appears to be on the verge of leaving her.  For my tastes, Coolidge's slurred and sleepy line readings here don't so much suggest a desperate, lonely and easily deluded woman as they do an actress who popped a full dose of Ambien before arriving on set. But she manages to be spectacular in the season finale, and I'm betting she'll get an Emmy.

For me the series standout is Meghan Fahy as the wife of a philandering tech bro. Determined to be satisfied with her marriage, she's created her own intricate web of happy talk and self-deception to keep her doubts and sadness at bay. It's an endlessly fascinating performance; the character could all too easily been a one-note, one-joke caricature, but Fahy finds hidden nuances in every line of dialogue.

I'm deliberately skimming the surface of the plot and many other characters here (played by the likes of Audrey Plaza, Michael Imperioli, Haley Lu Richardson and F. Murray Abraham, among others) because I think some shows are best experienced without too much explanation. Sometimes you just need to tune in and 'ride the wave.'  You'll get some benefit from watching the first season before this one, but not enough to be strictly necessary.