Clockwise from top left: The Leopard, Pamela’s Cooking with Love, Happy Face, Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, The Studio and Good American Family.Credit: Michael Howard
This week’s picks include Seth Rogan’s star-filled Hollywood satire, Ellen Pompeo’s bizarre true-crime drama, Pamela Anderson’s cooking show and US comedian John Mulaney’s new talk show.
The Studio ★★★½ (Apple TV+)
Please don’t confuse appearances in this Hollywood comedy by an absolute cavalcade of A-listers, starting with Martin Scorsese and Charlize Theron, for movie business authenticity. The Studio is a madhouse comic fantasy about getting your dream job and promptly going from one nightmare to the next. The dialogue is pithy, but the industry’s true failings are swept to one side as Continental Studios boss, Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), tries to keep his torpedoed ship afloat.
Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen star in the Hollywood satire The Studio.
Newly promoted by sleazy chief executive Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) after his mentor Patti Leigh (Catherine O’Hara) was fired, Matt is a cinephile who somehow believes he can make great films that are also profitable. Not since Ricky Gervais’ Extras have good intentions had such an excruciating celebrity downfall. When artist-friendly Matt visits the set of Sarah Polley’s new film to see a crucial single take scene with star Greta Lee being shot, his enthusiasm keeps inadvertently messing up the sequence. The humour is anxiety-based.
Rogen and his long-time creative partner, Evan Goldberg, are two of The Studio’s five creators, and they also directed all 10 episodes. That episode about Polley’s failed single take? Rogen and Goldberg shot it in a successful single take. The series is rife with textural references and sly nods. They have lovingly made scenes from the fake movies that bring famous names into the Continental offices – here’s Ron Howard’s 1970s crime drama, which of course has an issue Matt is too scared to address.
As characters, Matt and his team are essentially passing the baton in a farcical workplace relay; they barely have lives outside the Continental lot. Kathryn Hahn is a comic grenade as Continental’s maniacal head of marketing, Maya, while Matt’s deputy, Sal (Ike Barinholtz), and ambitious young executive, Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders), bring old and new outlooks that see them eventually square off in an episode dedicated to their rivalry. The cringe-worthy episodes are self-contained. One a week actually feels right.
Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, Seth Rogen and Chase Sui Wonders in The Studio.
I don’t believe Matt could actually make it at a real studio, but he’s the perfect guide for the oversized Hollywood the show creates. The episode where Matt chases Zoe Kravitz around the Golden Globes recreates the awards ceremony in startling size, and that consistent sense of scale gives the mayhem enough room to flourish. There are lessons Matt learns along the way, briefly bittersweet and scored like Chinatown, but as a television show that’s a love letter to the movies, what The Studio gets right, with its chaotic gags and absurd pivots, is knowing you can get away with anything if you keep the audience entertained.
Good American Family ★★ (Disney+)
Imogen Faith Reid and Ellen Pompeo in true-crime drama Good American Family.
The Natalia Grace story is the epitome of truth is stranger than fiction: a seven-year-old Ukrainian orphan with a rare form of dwarfism is adopted by an American couple in 2010, only to be abandoned by them in 2012 because they believed she was an adult plotting to harm them. It’s a bizarre true-crime story with no shortage of wild angles. But it’s also a storytelling trap. And this limited series falls into it.
The difficulties facing creator Katie Robbins (Sunny) are previewed by an extremely long and complex disclaimer that opens Good American Family, which among many qualifying notes emphasises conflicting perceptions. In trying to tell the story from everyone’s viewpoints, the narrative is awkward and stuttering. It wants to be incisive, but the default setting is satire as can-do mum Kristine Barnett (Ellen Pompeo) and sad-sack dad Michael (Mark Duplass) start to believe they’re living out a horror film.
If you know nothing about this case, then you may be more open to the show, but there are complications at every turn. Casting the 27-year-old Imogen Faith Reed as Natalia may have made the production easier, but it skewers your perceptions of the character. The true-crime documentaries that have followed Natalia’s journey have had a tabloid tinge, and quite possibly that’s where this dramatisation should have gone. In trying to grasp every possibility, it barely holds on to any.
The Leopard ★★★ (Netflix)
Astrid Meloni (left) as Maria Stella and Kim Rossi Stuart as Fabrizio in The Leopard.
While it doesn’t have the star power of Luchino Visconti’s masterful 1963 film – Alain Delon! Claudia Cardinale! Burt Lancaster! – this six-part adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel about an ageing 19th century Sicilian noble watching society change around him during Italy’s unification makes the most of the limited series format. The storytelling is thoughtful if too orderly, but the luxurious production values leap off the screen. In a story about the demise of tradition and inherent power, the show’s celebration of ballroom privilege makes almost too good a case for nostalgia.
Pamela’s Cooking with Love ★★★ (Binge)
Pamela Anderson gets her hands dirty in Pamela’s Cooking with Love.
After getting the best acting notices of her career in the independent feature film The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson’s second act continues with this amenable cooking show. Hewing to her long-held advocacy for a plant-based diet, each episode finds the former Baywatch star inviting a different noteworthy chef to her rustic Vancouver Island home for a lesson and shared conversation. Anderson does a subtle sell on the concept, but her enthusiasm for veganism and interest in her guests is plainly authentic. It’s a good spin on a familiar genre.
Happy Face ★★½ (Paramount+)
Dennis Quaid and Annaleigh Ashford in Happy Face.
More true-crime with fictional flourishes. This American series adapts the autobiography of Melissa Moore, whose father was the real-life Happy Face serial killer, Keith Jesperson. Moore has written about coming to terms with the crimes of her father, but the show puts them back in fictional contact, with the imprisoned Keith (Dennis Quaid) manipulating Moore (Annaleigh Ashford) to force her to interact with him and possibly save an innocent man on death row. There are some pertinent observations on the public’s hunger for true-crime, but as a mystery this is unfulfilling.
Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney ★★★(Netflix)
John Mulaney is hosting a new season of his talk show.
On the first of his 12 scheduled weekly live talk shows – Australian air time is Thursdays at 2pm – comic John Mulaney joked that the 10 months since his Everybody’s in L.A. test run was just long enough to forget any lessons learnt. Or maybe he was just being honest. At times the debut episode of Everybody’s Live felt like a dress rehearsal that got leaked – bits were tried out, the live format buckled, the pace meandered. But Mulaney was consistently amusing, and that’s a solid starting point as he and his team revise.
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