Deft Dramas: Mood & Welcome to Chippendales

Over the holidays, I had the pleasure of watching two very different but equally compelling shows. Both are engaging, character-driven dramas that find a novel way to tell a tale about what happens when men and women get into the business of the oldest profession in the world.

Welcome to Chippendales: I was vaguely aware that Chippendales exists - I knew it as a successful chain of clubs where male strippers perform elaborate shows to titillate a screaming female audience. But this miniseries gives us the incredible history of Chippendales and how it was created in Los Angeles in 1979 by an Indian immigrant named Somen "Steve" Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani, delivering an extraordinary performance). I was listening to Kumail on a podcast and he said, "don't read the Wikipedia article about Chippendales, just watch the show." And I exhort you to do the same. I had no idea about the wild and sordid history behind the meteoric rise and ultimately deadly fall of the franchise, but over the course of this eight-episode miniseries, you're in for quite the rollercoaster.

Alongside Nanjiani, we have the impeccable Murray Bartlett as his business partner, Nick De Noia, who comes on as a consultant to help choreograph a few routines and then becomes integral to the business, leading to a very testy partnership. There's the marvelous Annaleigh Ashford as Irene, a customer who is not very enthused by the strippers but wows Steve with her accountancy skills and ability to quickly find ways to keep costs down. She wows Steve in other ways too, but we won't get into that. And finally, Juliette Lewis rounds out the "four geniuses" as Denise, the costume designer who becomes Nick's right-hand woman and offers up even more creative inspiration for the shows that they are devising. 

And oh what shows they are. We get to watch the evolution of these dancers, initially stumbling like newborn baby giraffes and eventually morphing into gorgeous and coordinated Magic Mikes. The music budget for this show must have been insane but the soundtrack boasts just about every song you could imagine from this era. Frankly, when the pilot featured a dance set to ABBA's Gimme Gimme Gimme, I knew I was all in.

Created by Robert Siegel, he and his team of writers have crafted eight fantastic episodes that tell a story of greed, wealth, sex, privilege, racism, paranoia, and ultimately death. Steve is a fascinating character, one that you root for at the beginning and then are horrified by at the end. He faces discrimination but then manages to be a bigot himself; he wants to be rich, and can then never be rich enough; and it's wonderful to see the complex arc of this character and the others in his orbit as they get more famous and yet can't stand to be around each other. Such is the human condition, and Welcome to Chippendales tells this story with verve and a thumping disco beat.

Mood: This is a six-episode series created and written by Nicole Lecky, based on her one-woman play, Superhoe. That is a similar origin story to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag, and let me tell you, Nicole Lecky had better have a similarly meteoric rise in fame. Because Mood is one of the most riveting, fascinating, and empathetic pieces of television I have seen in a while.

Lecky plays Sasha, a young mixed-race woman who is the only Black person in her household. She is still living at home with her mother, stepdad, and sister, and harbors ambitions of becoming a famous singer, but she can't quite seem to get her life together. Following a bad breakup with her boyfriend Anton, she makes some poor decisions that lead to her family kicking her out of the house. When she finally ends up becoming the roommate of a young white woman named Carly Visionz (Lara Peake), Sasha is slowly sucked into the glamorous world of being a social media influencer. Only to then find herself being pulled into the more shadowy, sordid world of cam girls and sex work.

It's hard to say more. This show opens up with the delicacy of a blooming bud, gradually unfurling its petals to give you a rich story of this woman's reckoning with her past in order to find her way again. The way in which Sasha is so gradually tempted into doing things she never thought she would do is breathtaking and by the time you get to Episode 5, your heart will be in your mouth as you realize just how slippery this slope is. And I haven't even mentioned the most surreal part of this entire program - it will occasionally turn into a musical, with Sasha belting out amazing songs and orchestrating elaborate music videos out of her surroundings as she tries to process her trauma through music and lyrics, making something beautiful out of the absolute chaos.

You must watch this show. It's a feat of acting, music, and brazenly audacious storytelling. It feels fresh and unique, but it is likely the story of far too many women on the fringes of society who have slipped through various safety nets and found themselves in this position. This is not a show that is judgy about sex work - in fact it portrays many women in the profession who are clear-eyed and know their boundaries and counsel Sasha because they can sense that she is in far too vulnerable a position. It's a magnificent portrayal of one woman and her journey into her own. It really is a mood.