What to watch this week: The Big Door Prize, Camping, Taskmaster
Chris O’Dowd is in fine form in this Apple TV+ comedy about a small-town husband whose happiness is upended by the arrival of a mysterious machine.
The Big Door Prize
Apple TV
Chris O‘Dowd is in cracking form in Apple TV’s immensely watchable and lighthearted sci-fi series, The Big Door Prize, based on M.O. Walsh’s book of the same name and developed by David West Read, a writer, and producer on Schitt’s Creek. O’Dowd portrays Dusty, a high school history teacher and master whistler in the small town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. When we first meet him, he’s celebrating his 40th birthday and unwrapping 40 presents purchased for him by his wife and daughter. It’s all crap – a theremin, a bag of trail mix, a scooter – but Dusty receives them with pure joy. You get the sense that he’s a man entirely content with his modest, wholesome life. However, that serenity is disrupted when a mysterious, glowing blue machine dubbed ”The Morpho” suddenly materialises in the town’s general store overnight. No one knows how it got there, but it claims to reveal people’s ”true life potential.”
Camping
Stan
Julia Davis’ brilliant Camping is a work of staggering filth, and not for the faint of heart. Davis, who writes, directs, and stars in this twisted satire, crafts a pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged, micromanaging termagant named Fiona (Vicki Pepperdine), who drags her poor husband Robin (Steve Pemperton) on a camping trip for his birthday where she proceeds to terrorise him at every turn. The couple brings along their young son, a pitiable child who is forced to wear a goldfish bowl on his head due to allergies. The other campers include Fiona’s wimpy sister Kerry (Elizabeth Berrington) and her handsome, reformed alcoholic widower boyfriend Adam (Jonathan Cake), who brings along his chronic masturbating son uninvited. Rounding out the group are recent divorcee Tom (Rufus Jones), a terminally uncool (think, Topshop slogan tees) late-thirties man, and his new flame, the leathered-up nymphomaniac Fay (Davis). There’s also the camping site manager, a Norman Bates-style mummy’s-boy with an unfortunate speech impediment, often seen hanging out his mother’s gigantic, soiled knickers. The trip descends to chaos — all diarrhoea, portaloo threesomes, and drug benders. Dreadful!
Taskmaster
SBS Viceland, Monday 17 April, 8:30pm
Also available on SBS on Demand and Binge
If you’re in need of laughing to the brink of asphyxiation, Taskmaster is just the ticket. This British panel game show outdoes in humour most comedy shows. The premise is simple: five comedians are given a series of ridiculous tasks, and their efforts are scored by the Taskmaster, Greg Davies, and his assistant, Alex Horne. The tasks range from the absurdly simple (“Destroy this cake. Most beautiful destruction wins.” In which Noel Fielding rams a Victoria sponge in a washing machine) to goofily complex (drive a mobility scooter around an obstacle course in a car park while blindfolded, where comedian Lou Sanders nearly runs over a cameraman.) Watching some of the finest comic minds lose their rag under pressure is spectacular, brainless viewing. There is an Australian version of the show … but don’t bother with that.
Pachinko
Apple TV
Min Jin Lee’s sweeping 2017 historical novel, Pachinko, earned plaudits for the way it wove the individual stories of four generations of a Korean family through the 20th century. By some miracle, Apple TV’s audacious eight-part adaptation pulls off the same trick. The show looks astonishing; it’s worth watching for the elaborate period reconstructions alone, which span from the fish market mazes of Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s to the glowing Wall Street-like fortresses of 1980s Tokyo. The first four episodes, directed by the elusive video essayist Kogonada and shot by Tár cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, are particularly sumptuous. At the heart of the story is Sunja, a young Korean woman who falls in love with a wealthy Japanese man and becomes pregnant with his child. She is played expertly over three timelines — as a child by Yu-na Jeon, as an adult by Minha Kim, and as a grandmother by Academy Award winner Youn Yuh-Jung.
American Horror Story
Netflix
It was announced this week that media mogul Kim Kardashian will join the next season of Ryan Murphy’s cult anthology series American Horror Story. This show should have been put out of its misery years ago. However, let us not forget the edginess and genuine fear that the first season brought to the table. The story, set in 2011 Los Angeles, revolves around a family that moves into a house haunted by its former occupants, with Jessica Lange delivering a chilling performance as the ageing Southern belle next-door neighbour hiding a sinister secret. It’s a campy, creep-fest homage to those awesome psychological horrors of the 1970s, like Don’t Look Now and Rosemary’s Baby — only this time, with gimp suits. When it debuted over a decade ago, pre-streaming, when the blogging site Tumblr was at the height of its powers, it sent teenage girls into a frenzy. Largely thanks to its breakout star Evan Peters (who would later play Jeffrey Dahmer in Murphy’s unfortunately title Netflix hit Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story) — we were possessed.