The truth of country music

Delve into the history of the genre, and a look at a war which ‘goes to the heart of the struggle for democracy today’.

Bill Monroe, father of bluegrass

Eddie Cockrell gives his top recommendations for this week’s viewing on the box.

FREE TO AIR

Songwriter Harlan Howard, who co-wrote I Fall to Pieces with Hank Cochran and saw Patsy Cline’s version become a standard, once described the musical melting pot that was, and is, American country music as “three chords and the truth”. Marty Stuart, also a traditionalist, says “hard times and country music were born for each other. There’s a strange faith and hope in country music that has nothing to do with faith and hope.”

Singer-songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson puts it more bluntly: “To me, it’s soul music, probably the white man’s soul music.”

That this last quip is immediately followed by a picture of Charley Pride, one of the few African-Americans to find fame and success in the musical genre, is just one of the multitude of small joys in Ken Burns’s new star-studded documentary series Country Music, the exhilarating new eight-part history of an American art form that is the pioneering long-form nonfiction filmmaker’s first foray into musical history since his acclaimed 2001 series Jazz.

As is his custom, Burns proceeds chronologically, exploring in the debut episode (the first of four made available for preview) the incalculable influence of talent scout and record producer Ralph Peer, who is credited with producing what’s called the first country music recording, Fiddlin’ John Carson’s The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane; Peer’s development of early genre stars Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family; and the creation of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.

The great Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys lead the rise of swing music in episode two, with the third hour charting the post-World War II rise of bluegrass and honky-tonk music in the form of Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Ernest Tubb and, in detail, the tragic genius of Hank Williams. Rock ’n’ roll enters the picture in episode four, which focuses on the twin ascensions and overlapping influences of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley.

What Burns does, narratively and technically, has contributed significantly to the grammar of the nonfiction film. It could be argued that the success of his 1990 series The Civil War paved the way for the kind of long-form documentary series now taken for granted on streaming ser­vices, while his consistent and consistently imaginative use of the rostrum camera effect that uses slow pans across still photographs to dramatic effect has been adopted industry-wide. (Burns dislikes commercial endorsements, so when Steve Jobs wanted to rename this technique “the Ken Burns effect” in Apple-branded editing software, the filmmaker insisted on free equipment that he then donated to non-profit organisations.)

The kind of television event for which the DVD box set was created, Country Music is a sentimental walk down memory lane for the fan and a source of happy discovery for the newcomer. For everyone, it’s a chance to experience exhilarating music that cuts to the heart and soul of the human experience. In other words, three chords and the truth.

Country Music, Saturday, 8.30pm, SBS

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BITES

BLACK COMEDY

Wednesday, 9pm, ABC

The fourth and last series of ABC’s Black Comedy is under way on ABC, and at the halfway mark of the six episodes the energy level is as high as ever since the 2014 debut of this 30-minute sketch show. This is proper humour, cohesive and focused comedy that manages the unique Aussie feat of being lacerating and loving in equal measure. Highlights of this episode include the so-called “spine” sketch imagining 1970s Australia’s first interracial swingers party, the Aboriginal Starter Pack provided with confirmation at the Newly Confirmed Aboriginal Office, and the racial and cultural challenges of cross-mob dating (Uncle Joombi’s Apocalypse Boot Camp and the black history origin of the dumper are also visited). Joining core members Aaron Fa’Aoso, Nakkiah Lui and Bjorn Stewart for the 120 sketches in the season are 112 contracted actors, a raft of new writers with strong indigenous voices, and a behind-the-camera gender parity that is to be applauded. The entire run of Black Comedy is available online at ABC iView and is well worth revisiting.

FIRE FIGHT AUSTRALIA
Sunday, 1pm, Seven

As evidenced by the numerous references by commentators to the crisis and ways to help during the Super Bowl broadcast, the fires affecting much of Australia have commanded international support. Now, here at home, in partnership with Foxtel as well as promoters TEG Dainty and TEG Live, the Seven Network will broadcast the sold-out bushfire relief concert hosted by writer, actress and comedian Celeste Barber live from Sydney’s ANZ Stadium on Sunday afternoon and covering a full 10 hours of international music entertainment. Seven’s Sunrise hosts Samantha Armytage and David Koch, Sonia Kruger, Sam Mac, Larry Emdur and Kylie Gillies will present an all-star show featuring headliners Queen and Adam Lambert, Michael Buble (in a live cross), KD Lang and Alice Cooper, 5 Seconds of Summer, Conrad Sewell, Daryl Braithwaite, Delta Goodrem, Grinspoon, Guy Sebastian, Jessica Mauboy, John Farnham and Olivia Newton-John. All donations will go to the Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal’s Fire Fight Fund, in the press release’s wording, “to ensure local community groups can access support throughout their recovery journey, when the time is right for them”. As it should be.

THE DIRTY WAR ON THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE
Sunday, 8.30pm, SBS

Bondi’s own John Pilger has been making probing documentary films since 1970 and his latest is last year’s 107-minute examination of Britain’s National Health Service. Healthcare for all on the basis of need, not ability to pay, is the cornerstone of the NHS and since 1948 it has done that. The system, the first of its kind, worked well until a secret plan to privatise it in the free-market model was drawn up under the Thatcher government in the 1970s. This “goes to the heart of the struggle for democracy today”, says Pilger, who examines the disaster of the Hinchingbrooke Hospital conversion attempt in Cambridgeshire, and the free temporary clinic in Wise, Virginia, that treats throngs of uninsured Americans (“I thought Trump was gonna get it done,” one woman says of the US President’s thus far empty promise of healthcare reform). A chilling inquiry with more than a little relevance to Australia’s steps towards a public-private partnership approach to healthcare, the film stops short of Brexit yet prompts a necessarily hard look at our own path.

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PAY TV

Jane Levty on the run in a scene from Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist

Twist on musical in on song

No, those aren’t zombies chasing ambitious, talented yet troubled twenty-something coder Zoey Clarke (Jane Levy) through the streets of San Francisco — that would be so 2010. Rather, they’re the town’s good and primarily young citizenry, whose innermost thoughts, expressed through popular song and exuberant dance, have suddenly been made accessible to her without permission or control after she suffers some kind of enlightenment after being stuck in an MRI during a minor earthquake.

The highest-of-high concept musical comedy series Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, produced for America’s free-to-air NBC network, is a caffeinated, candy-coloured romp that wears its influences proudly and defiantly on its sleeve. It’s also such a precariously high concept that sceptics and new fans alike may wonder just how long such a show can maintain this pace through its 12-episode first season — hour-long episodes, at that. Yet based on the spell cast by this immediately likeable pilot, it’ll be fun to see how this song plays out.

Zoe works for one of those trendily decorated open-plan tech companies currently all the rage, this one making apps of some sort (its name, SRPQPoint, gives little away). She’s in line for the coveted manager of engineering job, but boss Joan (Lauren Graham, late of Gilmore Girls) feels she may be too distracted to take on the responsibility.

Joan’s not wrong, as even though Zoey maintains an apartment in the city, her heart is in the nearby sprawling house in which she grew up. There, her mother Maggie (Mary Steenburgen, who won a best supporting actress Oscar 40 years ago for the marvellous comedy Melvin and Howard) puts on a brave face while caring for her husband and Zoey’s father Mitch (Peter Gallagher, The O.C.), who suffers from a rare neurological disease that renders him immobile and speechless on the lounge room couch. Her brother David (Andrew Leeds), lurks around offering unwanted advice.

So apprehensive is Zoey about her father’s condition that on her mother’s advice she books that MRI. The technician offers a multitude of name-brand streaming music options to drown out the noise, but in the wake of the quake she flees to the street. There, random passers-by, individually at first and then in growing numbers, sing and dance their innermost thoughts, resulting in a full-scale musical number set to The Beatles’ Help! that will soften the hardest of hearts.

Getting little useful advice from her gender ambiguous and music-obsessed neighbour Mo (Alex Newell, Unique Adams on Glee), she attempts to harness her puzzling but not uneventful new power to befriend office crush Simon (John Clarence Stewart). Co-worker Max (Skylar Astin, Pitch Perfect), meanwhile, has his own crush on Zoey, and even Mitch escapes his disease long enough to sing to a grateful daughter.

The inevitable 16-track Spotify playlist for the show reveals a sound strategy to cover all musical bases, from the Singin’ in the Rain soundtrack to DJ Khaled.

Series creator Austin Winsberg is clearly influenced by such recent genre-bending successes as Glee and La La Land, but the resonances of the show go further back than that. From the pilot episode alone, memories are summoned of such shows as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and movies like West Side Story (itself currently being remade by Steven Spielberg) and the mid-sixties French two-step of director Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. Rarefied company indeed: whether Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist is a contact high or a sustained deep dive into quality pop culture remains to be seen, but like the classics it summons, it’s a show that could once more breathe new life into the always welcomed ­musical.

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. Monday, streaming on Stan

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BITES

THE DIRECTORS: ROBERT WISE
Wednesday, 7.30pm, Foxtel Arts

And speaking of West Side Story, its director, Indiana-born Robert Wise (1914-2005) was perhaps the most durably chameleon-like of Hollywood filmmakers: early in his career he edited the eternally influential Citizen Kane for star and director Orson Welles, and 39 years later he found himself directing the franchise reboot Star Trek: The Motion Picture for Paramount. In between he dabbled successfully in many genres, and this is the emphasis of the five British film critics and academics who comprise the presenting crew of the fine historical series The Directors, now in its third season. Using clips and observations, prominent critic Derek Malcolm and his colleagues walk viewers through this remarkable career that encompassed musicals (he also made The Sound of Music), horror films (The Curse of the Cat People, The Haunting) boxing pictures (The Champion, with the recently departed Kirk Douglas, Somebody Up There Likes Me) and even science fiction films (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Andromeda Strain). Cable and streaming services are windows of opportunity to study and enjoy film history, and shows like this provide concise and informed points to start tracking down titles.

THE PHARMACIST
Streaming on Netflix

In 1999, Danny Schneider was shot and killed while attempting to buy crack in New Orleans’ notoriously rough Lower Ninth Ward, one of many young people who fell victim to that scourge. Little did his father, Dan, a decent, religious, hardworking chemist in the nearby middle-class St Bernard Parish, know how this tragedy would affect his private and professional life. Already in the habit of taping and/or filming all his conversations, he responds to local police diffidence by single-handedly, doggedly tracking down his son’s killer. In this riveting four-part true-crime documentary, he takes on not only a local “pill mill” dispensing the highly addictive opioid OxyContin, but the makers of the drug, Purdue Pharma, as well. Directors Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst have struck American gold in Schneider, and tell his story with all the structural skill and narrative tension of early Errol Morris, particularly pivotal 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line. Says one Drug Enforcement Agency official with grudging admiration, “as crazy and out of control as this guy was, he got results”.

OPERA LEGENDS: LUCIANO PAVAROTTI
Sunday, 8pm, Foxtel Arts

Sky Arts’ 2018 12-part series Opera Legends gets off to a cracking start with a biographical profile of Luciano Pavarotti, presented by soprano Danielle de Niese. The right personality at the right time, the immensely talented, telegenic tenor known as “Big Lucy” is profiled from his beginnings as a footballer and primary school teacher trainee through his splash in the opera world and then television and film. Clips of his Australian tour with Joan Sutherland — “she taught him to breathe,” says one guest expert — give way to La Boheme at La Scala under Franco Zeffirelli. His commercial potential is harnessed in America in the early 1970s, and from there he became an unlikely but affable household name. Along to comment on the goldmine of rare and revealing clips are, among others, critic Rupert Christiansen, the Royal Opera House’s Oliver Mears and Classic FM broadcaster Rob Cowan. Opera Legends continues Mondays at 9.30pm, with repeats of each episode the following Sundays at 8pm.