Nathan Fielder’s new show will stress you out
Repeatedly jamming your fingers in a car door is probably more enjoyable than watching this brilliant, brutal series.
The Greatest Show Never Made
Prime Video
On a dismal morning in a sketchy London park in 2002, 30 excited young people gathered, anticipating the start of what they believed to be a new house-share TV show with a £100,000 ($192,000) prize. At the time, reality TV had only just taken off in Britain, with the phenomenally successful Big Brother launching two years prior. The contestants, fuelled by optimism and dreams of a burgeoning career in the entertainment business, willingly packed in their jobs and terminated their leases to film the show over one year. However, it turned out to be a complete sham; there was never any show. You’d think the fraudulent producer’s name being Nikita Russian might have been a foil, but, as one contestant puts it, “people were a lot more trusting in 2002”. This three-part documentary delves into the bizarre story through interviews with the participants, conducted 20 years later, and is interwoven with archival footage filmed by one of the contestants, and clever set pieces, including
a fully recreated apartment where much of the “show” was filmed.
Fellow Travelers
Paramount+/Prime Video
Gay sex and American politics? Say no more. Paramount+’s adaptation of self-described “homosexual/Republican” novelist Thomas Mallon’s 2007 book is sumptuous. The decades-spanning series concerns the clandestine romance of the raffish lothario and State Department official Hawk Fuller (Matt Bomer) and his main sex/love/mostly sex interest Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey). Tim is a shy, tortured Catholic and devoted Republican who is yearning for something deeper than illicit men’s room hook-ups. Their budding romance occurs in suboptimal political circumstances: it’s the peak of the Red Scare, and McCarthyism is revving up, and so is the accompanying Lavender Scare, whereby gay people working in the government were subjected to a witch hunt and increasingly ratted out by their peers. It flits to the 1980s when the men are estranged: Hawk is married to his childhood friend Lucy (Allison Williams), and Tim is dying of AIDS. Fellow Travelers hits that sweet spot between being a thing of historical intrigue and pillow-squealing romance.
How To With John Wilson
Binge
There’s a high chance that, by the end of the first episode of John Wilson’s HBO docu-comedy, you will be left choking back tears. This will be an odd experience because the final scene is an extended take of the filmmaker zooming in on his cat’s poo swirling around the toilet. This show is a thing of strange, eye-widening beauty. The premise is as follows: in each episode, Wilson takes an idea or prompt — such as “How to improve your memory” or “How to clean out your ears” — and uses it to tell a story. He does this by assembling impromptu interviews and a collage of covert footage taken on the streets of New York City (there’s a sublime shot of actor Kyle MacLachlan scrambling to get his subway card to work, which feels an awful lot like a b-roll from Twin Peaks: The Return), and narrates the story with his offbeat wisdom.
The Curse
Paramount+
Repeatedly jamming your fingers in a car door is probably more enjoyable than watching this brilliant, brutal show. The Curse is the deranged offspring of Nathan Fielder, the cult comedian/torture artist behind the prank TV shows Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, and Benny Safdie, the director of the Uncut Gems, a movie so stressful I suspect it shed years off my life. It follows the married couple Asher (Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (the mesmerising Emma Stone), who are aspiring property developers flipping cheap properties into eco-friendly bungalows and gentrifying the city of Española, New Mexico. They are also playing an optics game: Whitney’s parents are millionaire slumlords, so to distract from the fact, the couple pitch a reality program, “Flip-lanthropy”, produced by Dougie (Safdie) — in which they are shown “helping” (ie: white saviour-ing) the local community they have displaced. It’s astringent, awful fun.
You’re The Worst
SBS on Demand/Disney+
If after watching The Curse you find you want to spend even more time with another wretched couple, consider You’re The Worst. For five seasons this rom-com plunged us into the will-they-won’t-they love story of two prats living in Los Angeles. They are Jimmy Shive-Overly, a smug British novelist whose personality is basically Hugh Grant but even mopier, and Gretchen Cutler, an entitled, mostly useless music publicist. The pair meet sharing a cigarette outside the wedding of one of Jimmy’s ex-girlfriends — he’s just been kicked out for having a go at the ex on the dancefloor for being a cliche, and she’s trying to make off with a pilfered wedding gift. Their shared cynicism convinces them they’re formidable enough opponents for a one-night stand. Despite the characters’ lack of redeeming qualities, and the writing, which often errs on the side of trying too hard, there’s something oddly sweet about this show that sucks you right in.
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