May Binges Part 1: Big Mistakes, Beef, The Miniature Wife

Yes, I'm still desperately trying to catch up on all the new TV - truly a losing battle. But I've binged more shows and now it's your turn to binge them too!

Beef: I ordinarily don't do season-to-season reviews, but given that this is shaping up to be an anthology series and this season was extraordinarily good, I'll just go ahead and tell you to watch it, shall I? Created by Lee Sung Jin, this season felt much more chaotic and epic in scope than the first, now featuring two warring couples whose lives get intertwined in increasingly dangerous ways. Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan star as Joshua and Lindsay, a couple who help manage a fancy country club in California, but are trying to save up for their dream of running their own bed and breakfast. They used to be a cool couple, but now they are approaching midlife, their marriage is getting fractious, and it seems clear that thigns are goign downhill fast. Contrast this with the young couple Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton) who work at the country club. They are young and naive, desperate to start their lives together but constantly set back by financial pressures. Will any of these couples succeed? Or will everything fall apart spectacularly? Watch to find out!

Over the course of eight episodes (much tighter than the first season's ten!), this season takes you on an emotional rollercoaster and you can never predict from one minute to the next who is going to be blackmailing whom, and when there might accidentally be a murder or two. Youn Yuh-jung also stars as Chairwoman Park, the Korean billionaire who becomes the new owner of the country club, and as she gets more involved in all the drama, things escalate to an absurd and exciting degree. Just let this show unfold before your eyeballs - make sure you set aside enough time to do so, because you're not going to be able to stop once you get started.

The Miniature Wife: Created by Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner (based on a short story by Manuel Gonzalez), this show stars Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen as Lindy and Les, a couple that have been married for a very long time. The spark is fading from their marriage, and they mostly just tensely quote their couples therapist's aphorisms at each other in arguments. Lindy is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose career has now stalled after she moved to St. Louis to support Les's dream of working on cutting-edge research that could potentially earn him a Nobel Prize. That research involves the ability to shrink food so it could be transported more easily and then regrown when it arrives at the desired location. As the title of the show might have suggested, there is an accident and Lindy accidentally gets shrunk down to six inches tall. And Les, who hasn't yet figured out the formula to grow the shrunken objects back to their original size, has his work cut out for him.

I would watch this show a little bit at a time and frankly, it got to be a bit of a slog. Ten episodes long, 40+ minutes each, it was a bit too bloated. It would have been much better as a zippy half-hour comedy, but unfortunately, the writers meander through the story of this couple's chaotic marriage in far too much detail, giving us all the backstory about every single slight that led them to this precipice. In the present day, there's also a lot of unnecessary drama with supporting characters who don't really need to be there. The show covers a lot of good ground about how marriages require constant work, and also the nature of parenting, as both Les and Lindy have very different relationships with their teenage daughter Lulu (Sofia Rosinsky). But apart from the fun production design and camerawork to take us into Lindy's tiny world, this show struggles to be particularly engaging. I love these actors, and I watched all of it, but the whole time I found myself wishing they were doing something else.

Big Mistakes: Created by Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott, now here's a zippy half hour comedy that gets in and out in eight episodes. Levy and Taylor Ortega star as Nicky and Morgan, siblings who accidentally get on the wrong side of some Turkish crime bosses and are blackmailed into helping out with bizarre criminal enterprises. Meanwhile, their mother, Linda (Laurie Metcalf), is busy with their sister, Natalie (Abby Quinn), planning a campaign to run for mayor of their New Jersey town, so both women are too consumed with those logistics to notice the chaos Nicky and Morgan have descended into. 

Given how short and sweet the show is, I'll refrain from more details so you can let all the surprises wash over you. Suffice to say, Levy and Ortega are a great comic duo and watching Levy's face contort as he finds himself in impossible situations was my favorite part of the whole show. Nicky and Morgan are stereotypical adult siblings who have lost touch and have all these misconceptions about each other, but over the course of the show, they will start to learn and grow from each other, in both good ways and bad. I will warn you, the ending does have a cliffhanger, and Netflix hasn't picked this up for a second season yet, but I think the first season stands on its own two feet perfectly well and kept me very entertained on an otherwise boring weekend. It's charming and breezy, and sometimes that's all you can ask for.