TV Bonanza Part 1: Reboot, The Patient, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

An inordinate number of new shows popped up in August or September so I have been making my way through all of them for the past few months and am now ready with a grab bag of reviews. Settle in this week for a recap - there’s gonna be something for everyone!

Reboot: This is a sublime comedy from the mind of Steven Levitan, who previously created Modern Family and Just Shoot Me. Here, we get a show about rebooting a show, a behind-the-scenes satire of Hollywood and show runners and writers and the studio executives at Hulu. It’s a delicious meta commentary on the state of the television sitcom, and is an absolute delight for all eight episodes of its first season. It also boasts a stellar cast of folks like Rachel Bloom, Paul Reiser, Keegan Michael-Key, Johnny Knoxville, and Judy Greer, and because it’s not on network television, it can be liberal in terms of content and language. So don't watch with young kids.

The first episode has a big twist at the end, so I’ll just give you the basic set-up. There was a beloved network sitcom called Step Right Up and now a hip young showrunner (Bloom) wants to reboot it as an edgier dramatic show. However, the old showrunner (Reiser) is brought in by the studio, so we’re going to get a clash of the generations. There are fun moments in the writing room where the young diverse woke writers have to face off with the elderly Jewish writers who have a very different comic sensibility. And there's tension among the old cast members; they were off building very different lives for themselves in the past decades and now have different ambitions and hopes for this next step in their career. 

Reboot itself is very funny, occasionally filthy, and full of heart. The show within a show suffers from the usual TV problem where people are pretending it’s funnier that it really is, but since it’s a traditional sitcom, the mediocrity is kind of the point. This show is a gem, seek it out. With this cast and this caliber of writing, it has legs and will be well worth your time for many more seasons.

The Patient: This is a taut and brilliant ten-episode limited series from the minds of Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg who gave us The Americans. Here, they give us the story of a serial killer, Sam (the wonderful Domnhall Gleeson) who wants to try and stop killing, so he kidnaps Dr. Alan Strauss (the even more wonderful Steve Carell) to be chained in his basement and give him daily therapy to work through his issues. Needless to say, these aren’t ideal conditions, but needs must and Alan uses all his years of therapy training to apply all the empathy he can muster for this incredibly dangerous patient, whilst also reckoning with his own fears and fractured relationship with his son, who he may now never see again.

The scripts are impeccable, clearly indicating that the writers are very familiar with therapy speak and how these sessions ordinarily go even in extraordinary circumstances. The actors are brilliant, deftly navigating their way through this tense two-hander where they are able to demonstrate the full range of human emotion with a simple expression or change in tone. I recommended this show to my therapist and he quite enjoyed it, which does speak to what a good job it does in portraying the patient-doctor relationship, even in the most heightened of circumstances. Every episode has some fantastic cliffhanger that will keep you jonesing for the next installment, and it was always a highlight of my week. Now you can just binge it all in one satisfying gulp and join me in hoping that maybe Steve Carell will finally win his Emmy for this performance.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law: Oh what sheer fun. This show might be the most meta thing I have ever witnessed on television and it has fully dug its heels into the Marvel wink-wink-nudge-nudge comedy sensibility. The glorious Tatiana Maslany stars as Jennifer Walters, cousin to Bruce Banner aka the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo has many cameos through the season). After the two of them get into a car accident, Jen discovers that now she too turns into a Hulk when she gets angry. Which sucks because she has a promising career as an attorney and cannot afford to keep Hulking out in court. 

Bruce gives her some Hulk lessons and she turns out to be a quick study, because as a woman, she has had lifelong training in keeping her anger in check. This show is a feminist delight, always making jokes about the shit women put up with on a daily basis, and Jen is the female superhero I didn’t know I needed but am very pleased to have. Each episode of the season is charming, self-referential with Jen frequently breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience and comment on how it’s all going, and is an irreverent and fun time. There’s an overarching plot that keeps you engaged from week to week, the special effects and action are always on point like with any Marvel property, and the finale is a whimsical ode to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This show is a great treat for people who have stuck with Marvel on this never-ending journey - I have mostly slogged through their more dramatic shows, but She-Hulk is a light, frothy comedy that strikes exactly the tone that I love most about Marvel.  So dive right in for eight episodes of surprising and silly superhero shenanigans.