Looking to fill The White Lotus void? Watch Enlightened

Mike White's Laura Dern-led comedy is a winner.

Mike White's Laura Dern-led comedy is a winner.

Enlightened

If you’re looking for something to fill The White Lotus-shaped void, look no further than Enlightened. Mike White’s unbound comedy stars Laura Dern, in an unhinged, career-best performance, as Amy Jellicoe, a high-ranking, narcissistic corporate employee, whose affair with her boss leads to an office nervous breakdown. Amy takes a month off to recuperate at a wellness retreat in Hawaii, where she goes through a kind of New Age enlightenment. When she returns to her company, she’s shunned to the basement to work amongst the data-processing nerds (one of whom is played by White himself.) Here, she realises the benign evil of her corporate rulers, and tries her hand at whistleblowing. 

Watch on Binge

GIRI/HAJI

I found out about this series, which was cancelled after one season in 2020, through a bitter tweet directed at Netflix by the show’s writer Joe Barton. The long and the short of it: Netflix were trying to capitalise on The White Lotus-induced Will Sharpe mania (he plays a drug-addled, sharp-tongued rent boy in Giri/Haji) by promoting the show. “Thanks guys this tweet would have been so helpful 2 years ago,” Barton wrote in response.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JoeBarton_/status/1600770496957587457

Anyway, Giri/Haji is brilliant, and it’s a damn shame it was cancelled so soon. A super stylish, sexy intercontinental police thriller that blends two takes on the crime genre: British gangster and Yakuza. After a murder in London sparks an escalating war between two Yakuza gangs, Tokyo detective Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira) is sent to London to bring home his dangerous, and presumed dead, brother, Yuto (Yōsuke Kubozuka). Yuto, a former Yakuza member, is believed to be responsible for the killing. 

Watch on Netflix

Jackie

Pablo Larraín’s haunting film about Jackie Kennedy (played by a note-perfect Natalie Portman) in the hours before, during, and chaotic days after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, is astounding. It’s a stark film: a focused examination of one person’s grief, compounded with the grief of an entire nation. Jackie is structured around an interview with an unnamed journalist (an icy Billy Crudup), who is summoned to the Hyannis Port to interview the newly-widowed Kennedy and cement her late husbands legacy. The reporter is based on Thedore H. White, who wrote of his meeting with Kennedy for Life Magazine — it is through these conversations, Larraín explores the intersection of a Kennedy’s private, overwhelming grief, and her duty to the public. The film is bolstered by an unconventional orchestra-backed score by Mica Levi — who wrote the remarkable soundtrack for Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin — that will linger long after the credits roll.

Watch on ABC, Sunday at 8:30pm 

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

For some reason, there have been three adaptations of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 tale Pinocchio released in 2022: a Russian-made animated film Pinocchio: A True Story, featuring Pauly Shore as the titular puppet; an ugly Robert Zemeckis-directed Disney+ CGI remake starring Tom Hanks; and Guillermo del Toro’s (The Shape of Water) musical Netflix film. The latter is the only one worth watching. I can’t think of a director more perfect for this dark and twisted fable than del Toro. In this version, set in fascist Italy during the rise of Mussolini, Gepetto (David Bradley) is a benevolent woodcarver who’s son, Carlo, is killed when a rocket is dropped on the church in their village. Years later, in a drunken fit of grief, he creates Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) out of a pine tree grown from a cone Carlo had collected. The film, penned in collaboration with writer and animator Patrick McHale (Adventure Time), is existential and weird as hell. The stop-motion looks fantastic, and the songs, crafted by  Alexandre Desplat, are not annoying (major triumph). 

Watch on Netflix

Mildred Pierce

If Todd Haynes’ 2011 HBO adaptation of James M. Cain’s classic 1941 novel Mildred Pierce was a massive deal when it came out, and I’m just ignorant, please forgive me (at 14 my prerogative was Desperate Housewives). This is the exacting, deluxe and glacial television to live for, and I’m livid no one told me to watch it earlier. In Haynes’ adaptation, he ditches the noir framework of the 1945 Joan Crawford-led adaptation in favour of examining prickly mother-daughter dynamics. Kate Winslet stars as a Depression-era mother, who rises from waitress to restauranteur, trying all the while to please and care for her rancorous and vile daughter Vida (played by Evan Rachel Wood as an adult.) Throw in a tantalizing romance with Guy Pearce (who would later reunite with Winslet in Mare of Easttown) and a score by Carter Burwell, and you’ve got seven exquisite hours of television.