Review, Ray Martin in At Home Alone Together
“The best of us know you can’t take this pandemic lying down,” says Ray Martin, earnest host of the explosively funny new lifestyle parody.
“The best of us know you can’t take this pandemic lying down,” says Ray Martin, the earnest host of the explosively funny new laugh-a-minute lifestyle parody, At Home Alone Together. “Unless, of course, you’ve got the virus, then it’s probably smart to lie down.”
With Wednesday’s fresh episode the fourth of eight being written, produced and acted on the fly by a talented, isolating yet unerringly plugged-in group of creatives in a singular, inspired comic groove, this is must-watch TV for the next month and a show deserving of an extension for as long as there’s a crisis to thumb its nose at.
One of the more interesting developments over the past few months has been how quickly the new normal in television entertainment has adopted its own distinctive style, tropes and memes. Think of all those little faces in the same frame, each and every celebrity fundraising event, concert from home or Saturday Night Live episode looking like an extended riff on the title sequence of The Brady Bunch.
At Home Alone Together embraces that aesthetic with deadpan seriousness, offering in early episodes such recurring segments as Love Lockdown with Jacinta Bell (Becky Lucas) and her tolerant but awkwardly bashful partner, the tightly wrapped advice of money guru Helen Bidou (Anne Edmonds), a cooking segment with Bjorn Stewart that debuted with the chef getting an alarming allergic reaction to the weed soup he throws together, a temperamentally mismatched pair of identical twins (Ryan Shelton) tackling do-it-yourself projects around the house, Danish “Vibe Rater” Birget Oestengardt (Laura Hughes) instructing how to build a sauna in your bathroom and much more.
Fake commercials are scattered throughout, thus far including a politically pointed bit on the powers of bleach and tourism spots for Adelaide (“the city of carparks”) and Melbourne (“so many rooftop bars to point at!”).
Linking the bits together is the very game Martin, identified in a graphic as “on loan from another network” and seemingly channelling the spirit of Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun movie franchise. Reportedly great fun to work with on the show, Martin understands that the more seriously he takes the non-sequiturs and one-liners, the funnier he is.
A wide range of celebrities have paraded through the first two episodes, including Deborah Mailman dramatically reciting the first scene of Shakespeare’s Henry V Part One as her unsupervised kids cut each other’s hair off-screen and brief bits from the likes of Leigh Sales, Osher Gunsberg, Jennifer Byrne, Marty Moran, Peter FitzSimons and even Melbourne’s Father Bob Maguire, who spruiks a Zoom confessional booth.
“It’s no good washing your hands all the time unless we’re prepared to get our hands dirty,” says Martin serenely at one point, and it’s clear creator and showrunner Dan Ilic and company are doing the hard yards to create perhaps the one show we’ll really remember when this whole mess is over.
At Home Alone Together certainly isn’t taking current events lying down.
At Home Alone Together, Wednesday, 9pm, ABC and iview.
Bites
Tommy, Wednesday, 8.45pm, Ten and 10Play
When cynical and manipulative Los Angeles mayor Buddy Gray (Thomas Sadoski, from The Newsroom) is forced by rampant scandal and a federal judge to hire a female police chief, the first in the city’s history, he opts for gay former New York City captain and current feminist symbol Abigail “Tommy” Thomas (The Sopranos’ Edie Falco). This is the premise of this fast-paced, tartly written and deftly acted American police procedural. It’s an engaging drama but after 12 episodes it fell victim to low ratings and was cancelled less than a month ago by coronavirus-squeezed CBS. The show was created by Paul Attanasio, a former Washington Post film critic and Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Quiz Show and Donnie Brasco), whose first episode teleplay crackles with legitimate truths and memorable quips. In her first week on the job, Thomas must navigate a standoff between the city and Immigration Customs Enforcement over an illegal immigrant even as she tries to mend fences with her estranged daughter, Kate (Olivia Lucy Phillip). Brisbane-born New Yorker Adelaide Clemens (The Great Gatsby) shines as Tommy’s director of communications, and episode directors include Melanie Mayron. Hopefully another network can pick up the show.
Blinded (Fartblinda), Tuesday, 11.05pm, SBS and On Demand
Known as Fartblinda in its native Swedish, Blinded is a steamy new eight-part financial thriller that stars Julia Ragnarsson, recently seen in last year’s Sweden-set American horror film Midsommar, as the single Bea Farkas, a financial reporter for the fictitious Daily Post. She’s smitten with the married chief executive of a bank, Peder Rooth (Matias Varela, from Narcos and The Borgias), and when she’s assigned to interview him and makes the mistake of asking hard questions to mask their steamy affair, the miscalculation sets events in motion that turn a seemingly legitimate if illicit relationship into a tense game of cat and mouse. The show is based on Swedish journalist Carolina Neurath’s 2016 novel of the same name. “I hope this will be a nice mixture of a relationship drama together with this financial world, the investigation stuff and also the thriller elements,” she says. “It gives the show some extra spice. It’s always fun to watch people in love.” It is, it does and it is.
Miss Scarlet and the Duke, Thursday, 8.30pm, 7Two and 7Plus
Riding smartly on the petticoat tails of Miss Fisher and her ilk, the period crime caper and first A&E international co-production (with Los Angeles-based Element 8 Entertainment) Miss Scarlet and the Duke stars costume drama specialist Kate Phillips (Peaky Blinders, Downton Abbey, The Alienist, War & Peace, Wolf Hall) as the title sleuth, who assumes her newly dead but spiritually present father’s detective agency in 1880s London but must fight misogyny before she can fight crime. She finds an unlikely ally in her father’s former protege, serial womaniser and current Scotland Yard inspector William “The Duke” Wellington (Jamestown co-star Stuart Martin, a stern Hugh Jackman type) and the game is afoot. In this first episode, writer and series creator Rachael New (Trollied, Grantchester) lays out her thesis when someone asks the heroine: “A lady detective? What reason would you want to be such a thing?” Says she: “When you’ve had as many people as I telling me what you can and cannot be, that’s reason enough.”
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Free to air
Carell’s out of this world for laughs
“Being an astronaut is a little like being a virgin,” muses four-star general Mark R. Naird (Steve Carell). “You can’t claim it until after it happens.” Naird is the harried yet focused chief of space operations for the newly formed sixth branch of the US military and the protagonist of Netflix’s new comedy series from creators Carell and Greg Daniels (among whose many shows include the American version of The Office, which helped make the actor a star and propelled him to a Hollywood career).
The convoluted one-liner, which is used to justify the desperate last-minute inclusion of regular tradies on the Space Force’s inaugural mission to put “boots on the moon” by 2024 at the request of an unseen but tightly wrapped American president, is also a fair representation of the show’s shaggy dog humour throughout the 10 half-hours.
Naird is presented his fourth star in the opening scene, and fully expects to assume command of the air force, thus dislodging his nemesis, General Kick Grabaston (Noah Emmerich). Instead, he’s put in charge of the branch tasked with resuming exploration of the final frontier.
As a side note, there really is a Space Force, which was created in December 2019, and there really is a chief of space operations, General John W. Raymond, who said of Carell’s casting, “I was hoping for Bruce Willis but I love his shows”. Looking on at the small ceremony is Naird’s wife, Maggie (Lisa Kudrow), and daughter Erin (Diana Silvers). From there it’s off to his first meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it’s a credit to the show that it has cast the military with such comic luminaries as Patrick Warburton (Friends), Diedrich Bader (The Drew Carey Show) and Jane Lynch as the chief of naval operations. Lynch is one of three parts filled by veterans of director Christopher Guest’s improvisational mockumentaries like Best in Show, the others being Don Lake as Naird’s slow but earnest assistant, Michael Hitchcock in a subsequent guest spot and the late, great Fred Willard, in his final and much-too-small role, as the general’s forgetful, non-sequitur-spewing father.
Rounding out the main cast is Ben Schwartz, late of Daniels’s Parks and Recreation, as social media director F. Tony Scarapiducci (known to all as F..k Tony); Tawny Newsome as a helicopter pilot-turned-astronaut who is advised to embrace her position as a pioneering black American woman by making her first words upon setting foot on the surface, “there goes the neighbourhood”; Dan Bakkedahl (Veep) as the confrontational secretary of defence and Jimmy O. Yang (Silicon Valley) as a staff scientist.
Among Naird’s most prominent initial hires is the respected scientist Dr Adrian Mallory (the always-dependable John Malkovich), and the show’s narrative spine is the contentious but ultimately productive clashes between the practical, pacifist researcher and the insecure yet gung-ho military man under constant pressure.
The Chinese prove to be mischievous yet malicious adversaries in the space race, even as Erin takes a job on the base’s food truck, Meal Armstrong’s (motto: “one small snack for a man, one large soda for mankind”).
The humour is scattershot and seldom laugh-out-loud funny, yet Carell is fine as a gravelly voiced variant of Michael Scott, while Malkovich serenely steals almost every scene he’s given. Only Kudrow gets seriously short shrift, as her character begins the second episode sentenced to a 40-year prison term that’s never explained and an entire episode is devoted to an odd conjugal visit. Still, while not The Office, Space Force is a fresh enough spin on the type of workplace comedy both men have pioneered over the previous decade to provide a pleasing diversion.
Space Force, streaming on Netflix.
Bites
The Directors: Victor Fleming, Wednesday, 7.30pm, 10.40pm, Foxtel Arts
Many Australians have used their time in isolation to catch up on classic Hollywood cinema, and Foxtel Arts’ ongoing presentation of British series The Directors provides an illuminating and valuable road map to the men and women who shaped the industry in the 1930s and 1940s. First, a pop quiz: which studio director was at the creative helm of both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind? The answer is Californian Victor Fleming, the most misunderstood and least appreciated of the great directors and “the beating heart of Hollywood”. Fleming directed 15 pivotally important features for MGM, and beginning in 1932 he played a key role in shaping the careers of Jean Harlow (Bombshell, the film that birthed screwball comedy), Spencer Tracy (Captains Courageous, for which the actor won an Oscar) and Clark Gable (five films in all, beginning with Red Dust alongside Harlow). Fleming died in Arizona of a heart attack in 1949, but his legacy is charted in this entertaining and informative hour of vintage film clips and analysis.
Line of Duty, Monday, streaming on Acorn TV
A former doctor and Royal Air Force officer, British TV writer/producer/director and novelist Jed Mercurio wasn’t all that well-known outside his native Britain until the international success of the 2018 political thriller series Bodyguard. Yet after learning and honing his craft in the early part of the century, the showrunner has since 2012 produced five seasons of the immensely popular police procedural series Line of Duty, the fifth series of which now joins the first four on Acorn TV. A pair of officers (Martin Compston, Vicky McClure) work under a supervisor (Adrian Dunbar) in the Anti-Corruption Unit 12 to ferret out colleagues suspected of misdeeds, focusing on a different suspect in each season. This time around their quarry is an undercover officer played by Stephen Graham, who recently essayed mobster Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. But things aren’t always as they seem, and throughout these six hour-long episodes Mercurio the writer extends his reach by “going behind the mask”, as he puts it, of the organised crime groups only hinted at in previous series.
The Outsider, Sunday, 10am and 7.45pm, Box Sets, and Foxtel Now
Over the years, the film and television adaptations of Stephen King’s books and stories have ranged from the sublime (The Shawshank Redemption) to the ridiculous (The Tommyknockers). At or near the top of the former list is the recent 10-part HBO series The Outsider, which was written about in these pages not long ago. The key difference now is that the bingeworthy series was initially rolled out in weekly instalments on Foxtel Showcase, which impeded the slow-burn effect of the cumulatively creepy drama. Now, the show may be watched uninterrupted in two sessions, or accessed via the Foxtel Now service. Ben Mendelsohn is a series producer and stars as a Georgia detective whose investigation of the horrible murder of a boy reveals a mysterious, shapeshifting malignancy that manifests itself over and over throughout the US, feeding on the fear of those whose loved ones it kills. Bill Camp, Julianne Nicholson, Mare Winningham, Paddy Considine and Jason Bateman co-star, but the revelation of the series is Cynthia Erivo as a preternaturally gifted amateur sleuth.
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