When reality TV is all too real
The history of television has always been about pushing boundaries, both technical and artistic.
Eddie Cockrell gives his top recommendations for this week’s viewing on the box.
Free-to-air
The history of television has always been about pushing boundaries, both technical and artistic. One of many succinct examples of this is the tale of the two Ozzies, Nelson and Osbourne. Oswald George “Ozzie” Nelson was the New Jersey-born American bandleader, producer, director and actor who married his combo’s vocalist, Harriet Hilliard, in 1935 and subsequently featured her and their two boys (one of whom grew up to be pop star Ricky Nelson) on a radio show that morphed into the stodgy 1950s TV phenomenon about the perfect American family, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
The second Ozzy is, of course, Birmingham native, Black Sabbath vocalist and unlikely reality TV star John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne, who, along with wife Sharon and two of their three precocious children, virtually invented the genre with their three-year run as the decidedly imperfect but nevertheless somehow beguiling The Osbournes on MTV from 2002 to 2005 (their eldest daughter wisely opted out). Unsurprisingly, in the new, improbably nostalgia-drenched 42-minute documentary The Osbournes: The Price of Reality, Ozzy refers to Ozzie in the most disparaging of terms, thus pungently illustrating how much the rules have changed in the almost 40 years that separate their successes.
“The problem with reality TV is what happens when it really gets real,” says Jess Cagle, the editorial director of magazines People and Entertainment Weekly (the latter of which co-presents this show), and he’s referring to the drug and lifestyle excesses that made The Osbournes a cable TV hit even as it stressed out the already histrionic family. Two camera crews on 12-hour shifts followed them night and day, and when Sharon was diagnosed with cancer in the second series the pressure exacerbated Ozzy’s drinking problem and sparked drug dependencies for son Jack and daughter Kelly (who, in Ricky’s footsteps, began a recording career of her own).
Yet amid the chaos, their bond was palpable. “I love you more than life itself,” Ozzy yells in a vintage clip, “but you’re all f..king mad.” Contrast that with Kelly today — they look a lot less dissipated now than in the above photo — who avows “love will heal anything. Anything”.
Viewers with extra time on their hands might want to tune in to Viceland an hour early for The Rise of Trash TV, a pithy review of groundbreaking reality TV ringleaders such as Phil Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Maury Povich and Jerry Springer. These are two of the five episodes produced for the 2018 Biography limited original documentary series Cultureshock, that reveal untold stories behind watershed moments in American pop culture. The remaining three instalments explore the death of Michael Jackson (yet to be scheduled), comedian Chris Rock’s preparation for his HBO special, Bring the Pain (airing mid-October), and, as reviewed last week, the creation and unjust fate of the single-season cult TV hit Freaks and Geeks.
These are wild rides to be sure, and the boundaries they pushed helped forge today’s international TV landscape.
The Osbournes: The Price of Reality, Tuesday, 10.30pm, SBS Viceland.
Click here to see the full TV guide
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The Bites
Secret Bridesmaids’ Business
Sunday, 9pm, Seven
Every once in a while a ripe, melodramatic soap opera scratches that storytelling itch, and for those who require such a balm there’s the new six-part series Secret Bridesmaids’ Business. The first big show for Seven Studios, the Victoria-shot drama is “based on the (1999) stage play and an original story and characters” by veteran television writer Elizabeth Coleman (Home And Away, Sea Change). Leukaemia survivor and winery owner Olivia Cotterill (Georgina Haig) is about to marry family lawyer Alex Blake (Oliver Ackland), and for her bridesmaids she’s chosen childhood mate Melanie Heyward (Abbie Cornish) and bisexual British solicitor Saskia De Merindol (Katie McGrath), a BFF and Alex’s work colleague. But everyone’s got secrets, and as the nuptials approach the three months are filled with skeletons spilling out of closets, alliances shifted and friendships tested. Melanie and Saskia couldn’t be more different, and when the former unwittingly allows a stranger into the mix the results are incendiary. Handsomely mounted and plummily played, the first episode promises intricate plotting and all the skulduggery demanded of the genre.
The Pool
Sunday, 7.40pm, ABC
It’s not too late to jump into ABC’s The Pool, which is a mischievous, meticulously researched and cheekily upbeat historical exploration of Australia’s fascination with the recreational and emotional power of water. Last week saw the premiere of part one, in which narrator Richard Roxburgh and a host of familiar talking heads from Peter FitzSimons to Myf Warhurst to co-writer Christos Tsiolkas wax poetic about the hedonistic lure of pools while vintage footage reminds us of the architectural richness of them (the episode remains available online via ABC iview). In this second episode, the public spaces become flashpoints for debates over race, gender, sexuality and religion. The Pool is based on the acclaimed installation of the same name curated by Michelle Tabet, Amelia Holliday and Isabelle Toland, and first presented at the 2016 edition of Venice’s Art Biennale. It is a collaborative triumph between director Sally Aitken (David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema) and Sydney’s Mint Pictures (The Secret Life of Death). Composer Caitlin Yeo’s music underscores the loves inherent in the subject.
The Name of the Rose
Thursday, 8.35pm, SBS
In much the same way French film director Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet) became obsessed with Italian author Umberto Eco’s 1980 debut novel The Name of the Rose in the years preceding the 1986 film he made of it starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater, this eight-part Italian miniseries based on the same property seems to have been a singular obsession of actor and dual US-Italian citizen John Turturro (Do the Right Thing, The Night Of). One of four credited screenwriters here, Turturro, who claims never to have seen the previous film, is Franciscan monk William of Baskerville in this leisurely, absorbing and complex murder mystery set in a 14th-century abbey. Rupert Everett is the ruthless inquisitor Bernardo Gui and young German actor Damian Hardung essays Slater’s role of novitiate Adso of Melk. On the strength of the first two episodes made available, Turturro’s calm intensity is an anchor for a series that not only stays faithful to the book but adds enough action to satiate a modern audience.
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Pay TV
Favreau spices up formula
“What do we do now?” director and actor Jon Favreau asks his co-host, friend and prominent Korean-American chef Roy Choi, after they have spent the better part of a new half-hour segment of this cross between a cooking program and Hollywood gossip session The Chef Show making a mouth-watering French onion soup from scratch. “It’s French onion soup,” Choi deadpans. “Eat it.”
This exchange, at once arch and amiable, is what makes the Favreau-directed offering such an appealing entry in the seemingly unending cavalcade of cooking programs. Simply put, Favreau comes across as a genuinely nice guy who seems like someone you could hang out with and learn from. Favreau also seems to acknowledge that the genre is full of such convivial personalities, as he and Choi effortlessly incorporate a series of A-list stars and interesting locations into the program. Call it the filmmaker’s secret sauce: but what are the ingredients?
Favreau comes by this worldliness and love of food honestly. The son of a Russian Jewish mother and French Canadian-Irish Catholic father, he was born in Flushing, Queens and educated in his mother’s faith (“Jews don’t fry chicken!” he announces, doing just that during one episode of the show). Though he first came to attention as a teaching assistant in the 1993 sports drama Rudy, it wasn’t until he wrote and co-starred with new mate Vince Vaughn in the 1996 comedy Swingers and followed that up with a single-season stint as a millionaire kickboxer in the TV show Friends that Hollywood really took notice. In 2008 he directed and acted in Iron Man and has been a major player in the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever since.
The genesis of The Chef Show came six years or so ago, when Favreau wrote, produced, directed and starred in an independent feature-length comedy drama about a headstrong cook who quits a secure restaurant job after a public fight with a restaurant critic to operate his own food truck. The film, Chef, also forged his friendship with Choi, who at the time was known for creating the Kogi Korean barbecue truck and signed on to consult and oversee the meals prepared for the movie. Favreau’s gamble to step away from superhero franchises to realise his passion project paid off with a muscular box office return, and he’s been in great demand since.
In the first half of season one (they did the same thing with Disenchantment — why does Netflix confuse their audiences this way?) Favreau welcomed Iron Man co-star Gwyneth Paltrow to the kitchen, and followed that up with an episode in which he hosted Robert Downey Jr, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, new Spider-Man Tom Holland, and directing brothers Anthony and Joe Russo (Captain America, Avengers) at the Atlanta hamburger eatery Holeman and Finch Public House for a congenial meal. He kicks off the recently posted second half with a visit from Seth Rogen, who shares food-related career stories, and segues to an episode set in the kitchen of George Lucas’s legendary Skywalker Ranch production facility, where the assembled cooks speculate on how Darth Vader manages to feed himself (Favreau has mixed the sound for many of his pictures there, but there’s no consensus on Vader).
“We’re working on a show that we want to see,” Favreau says during one of the episodes, comparing his product to the difference between asking questions while on a film set, which is how he learned to direct, with formal education and training. “There would be no room service if we didn’t have onion soup,” he concludes, sounding at once worldly and blokey.
The Chef Show, streaming on Netflix
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The Bites
Law & Order: SVU 20th Birthday 30-Day Marathon
Sunday, Universal TV
This week’s legacy TV recommendation isn’t an old show — in fact, it’s only days until the American premiere of the 21st season of the venerable procedural Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Universal TV has been airing the durable procedural — itself a spin-off of the original Law & Order that also ran for 20 years — chronologically, and dedicated viewers will have a chance to refresh or acquaint themselves with seasons 19 and 20 beginning Sunday at 1.30pm. Recall that in season 18 Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice T) finally made sergeant, and in the early going here he bends the rules more than a bit to bring a fugitive rapist back from Cuba. In the run-up to season 19, writer-turned-showrunner Michael Chernuchin told a Hollywood trade paper his aim was “at the end of every episode, I want half the audience to throw their shoes at the television and the other half to stand up and cheer”. For durability alone, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit deserves that hurrah.
New Amsterdam
Streaming on Stan
If you want to feel better about your health-care, have a look at the cautionary yet eventful medical drama New Amsterdam, which has begun its first season of 24 hour-long episodes on Stan even as the second series premieres stateside. “Let’s be doctors again,” urges hard-charging yet insouciant physician Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold, The Blacklist), even as he begins his first day as the new medical director of the besieged New York public hospital by firing the cardiac surgical department. “The whole system’s rigged,” warns cardiovascular surgeon Floyd Reynolds (Jocko Sims, The Last Ship), whom Goodwin nevertheless taps to run a new heart unit in a posting that will jeopardise his affair with emergency department chief Dr Lauren Bloom (Janet Montgomery). The large cast is reminiscent of such programs as E.R. and House. Desperate Housewives producer David Schulner adapted the show from the book Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer, former medical director of that eternally troubled Manhattan institution. New Amsterdam may not be a miracle cure, but the second season renewal indicates a healthy prognosis.
The Brink
Streaming on DocPlay
Given his high profile as a lightning rod of controversy during his stint as chief strategist for Donald Trump early in his administration, it was perhaps inevitable that at least two documentaries are in the pipeline profiling the former film producer and alt-right advocate, Stephen K. Bannon. The first out of the gate, veteran documentarian Errol Morris’s American Dharma, seems to still be seeking Australian distribution, leaving the field wide open for Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry director Alison Klayman’s The Brink, a close-up yet clear-eyed profile of Bannon that premiered to deserved acclaim earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. The director begins her coverage of Bannon just after he leaves the White House job in the wake of that deadly August 2017 Unite the Right rally to rejoin Breitbart News he’d guided previously, hitch his wagon to doomed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and preach conservative gospel in Europe. The Brink is available only on DocPlay, the streaming service dedicated to nonfiction work that was begun three years ago by Australian distribution and rights management company Madman Entertainment.
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