One of the most gob-smacking hours of TV in recent history
The finale of Nathan Fielder’s nerve-shredding HBO reality experiment has crash-landed. You’ll find yourself asking – repeatedly – how he managed to pull it off.
Stay inside this weekend and check out these television selections.
Adults
Disney+
This new show from writers (and Jimmy Fallon alumni) Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw desperately wants to be the Gen Z hangout comedy, in the way Friends was for Gen X and Girls for millennials (it even – ill-advisedly – quotes Lena Dunham’s famous “voice of a generation” line). It follows a group of twenty-somethings flat-sharing in the depths of Queens, New York – although it’s unmistakably filmed in Toronto. The house belongs to the parents of Samir (Malik Elassal), who is spectacularly unemployed. Joining him are Billie (Lucy Freyer), an aspiring journalist stuck at a dodgy media company with no insurance – familiar to any Gen Zer who’s served time at a start-up compensating for a $30k salary with a fridge full of unlimited kombucha; Anton (Owen Thiel), the requisite house gay with a nebulous Zoom-based job; Issa (Amita Rao), who is oversexed and activist-adjacent; and her sweet but daft bisexual boyfriend Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) – always referred to by his full name – the newest arrival. These are facts we learn about the characters, but they never feel fully formed; they drift through the same stagnant phase of life with little distinction. The core problem of Adults is that while it knows the Gen Z lingo, it has nothing insightful to say about the generation it tries to represent.
The Rehearsal
Max
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Season 2 of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder’s nerve-shredding HBO reality experiment – lo and behold – the finale has crash-landed. I use the term advisedly: this year’s emotional crescendo sees Fielder obtain a real commercial pilot’s licence and captain a two-hour flight out of San Bernardino and back again. For the uninitiated, The Rehearsal involves Fielder constructing baroquely intricate simulations of real-life scenarios to examine the futility of our desire to control the uncontrollable. Real people come to him with problems – difficult conversations, life-altering decisions like whether to become a mother – and he offers them something seductive: a version of reality where nothing is left to chance. But this season was different. It’s about plane crashes and how to avoid them. Fielder theorises, after combing through thousands of pages of dense government documentation, that crashes often stem from communication breakdowns between pilots and first officers. Naturally, he decides to test this. The final episode is one of the most gobsmacking hours of television in recent memory. You’ll find yourself asking – repeatedly – how he managed to pull it off. By legally sidestepping FAA regulations (no tickets were sold, so the 150 on-board actors counted as guests, not passengers), Fielder takes the controls of a real Boeing 737 with fewer than 300 hours of flight experience, having trained entirely on a simulator. The Rehearsal doesn’t exactly promise emotional television, yet somehow it always leaves you reaching for the tissues.
Mountainhead
Max, from June 1
Sometimes a film is just a vessel for Jesse Armstrong’s thermonuclear one-liners — and thank God for that. Mountainhead, the Succession creator’s feature debut, strands four tech oligarchs at a ludicrously luxe Utah megalodge while the outside world catches fire – quite possibly because of them. Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Ramy Youssef and Jason Schwartzman play a cabal of Silicon Valley sociopaths with a combined net worth of a trillion dollars. There are shades of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and every other cashed-up but charisma-void bozo you could name – though these men are less specific impressions than a distilled essence: solipsistic, wired, overleveraged. As deepfakes unleashed by Venis (Smith) threaten to ignite global conflict, their weekend retreat morphs into a mix of poker games and apocalypse planning. Yes, it’s mostly men having a pissing contest. But the script is such a gleeful barrage of barbed insults and billionaire psychobabble that it barely matters.
And Just Like That …
Max
And just like that … we’re doing this again. The third season of Michael Patrick King’s glossy sequel to Sex and the City totters back onto the screen, prohibitively expensive Manolos on, now with a firmer sense of identity. After a jittery debut (Big’s Peloton-induced demise, Che Diaz) and an absurd second season – which feels, in retrospect, like a necessary overcorrection – things have settled down. This time around, the show feels more assured, less desperate to prove itself. How much you enjoy it, though, may depend on your tolerance for the Carrie-and-Aidan of it all. Personally, I’m very much up for the will-they-won’t-they. As a refresher: Season 2 ended with Aidan deciding to try being a more present dad, which meant leaving the beautiful Gramercy Park apartment he and Carrie bought together, and heading back to Virginia to co-parent with his ex-wife. Not a break-up, exactly – more of a “five-year pause.” Naturally, just as Carrie is adjusting to solo life again, a smouldering and brusque British author (played by Jonathan Cake) moves in downstairs. For all its nonsense – and there is plenty – the show remains hopelessly watchable.
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