Dead To Me: A Deadly Duo

When I first watched Dead To Me last year, I enjoyed it. But it wasn't a highlight amidst everything else I was bingewatching and I never got around to reviewing it on this blog. Well now, Season 2 dropped on Netflix and I hungrily gobbled up that sucker over the weekend. What a difference a pandemic makes.

The show stars Christina Applegate as Jen, a woman who was recently widowed after her husband was killed in a hit-and-run accident, and is very angry about it. She is raising two young sons, is angry that the police cannot figure out who killed her husband, and spends a lot of her time drinking and listening to heavy metal to deal with her grief. When she goes to a therapy group, she meets Judy (Linda Cardellini), who is grieving the loss of her fiance. However, Judy is a very different person than Jen - she is a bit of a hippie, and believes in energy and crystals, and is trying to cope with her grief in more positive ways. But hoo boy. Things take a turn. Also, let me be clear, this show is a comedy. I know it doesn't sound like it, but these women are turning in some incredible comic performances as they delve into a plot that gets more twisty and convoluted with every episode.

It's really hard to write about this show because every single episode contains some dark twist and major reveal that will compel you to hit "Play Next Episode" as fast as you can. In fact, that was what put me off a bit when I first watched it - the twists were great and juicy, but the show almost became too predictable in its unpredictability. There are very clear story beats that take place and it can be enormously frustrating at times to see things play out the same way over and over again. But that being said, this show is deliciously frothy and fun, and in the second season it really leans into its dark comedy, Desperate Housewives-esque vibe. I won't spoil too much, but let's just say there's a certain soap opera trope that makes its way in and is delightfully kitschy to behold.

The key thing this show has going for it, of course, is its two leading actresses. These women are incredible and play off each other in fantastic ways to demonstrate the passion and problems inherent in a female friendship. Their relationship is such a rollercoaster ride, particularly as the secrets they're harboring keep bursting out, and while they have great comic timing, there are also intense dramatic and psychological moments as these women reckon with who they are and how they are going to move on after the terrible things they've done.

The second season of Dead To Me is a great example of a comedy that builds on its characters, amps up the stakes, and gets even wackier. It's hilarious, intense, and like Season 1, ends on a humdinger of a cliffhanger that will make you really mad that you now have to wait a whole year for another season. Such is the Netflix life. But right now, if you're bored, there are two glorious seasons that await you, and that should tide you over nicely for at least a portion of this quarantine. Enjoy!

Bad Education: A Startling School Scandal

Looking for something that’s both quick and meaty to watch this weekend? I offer up Bad Education, featuring the inimitable Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney, and a rollicking script from Mike Makowsky that details the biggest public school embezzlement scandal in American history. It’s a fun ride.

Jackman plays Frank Tassone, a school superintendent on Long Island, New York who is credited with elevating the Roslyn High School to the #4 school in the country. Everyone loves Frank: a former English teacher, he cares about his students, wants everyone to succeed, and under his stewardship, everything’s coming up roses. Also, thanks to capitalism, a good public school means great property prices, so the members of the school board are thrilled that their real estate prices keep skyrocketing. What could go wrong?

Well, things start unraveling when they discover Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney), the Assistant Superintendent and Frank’s right-hand woman, has been misusing school funds to pay for her home renovations and other expensive habits. The accountant and school board are shocked - Pam is such an upstanding member of the community! - but on Frank’s advice, they agree to hush it up. Pam is fired, but the cause is not publicized, and everyone seems content to treat her as the only rotten apple. Unfortunately, the beloved Frank Tassone was fully involved in this embezzlement scheme, and as the movie progresses, more details come to light about his bizarre personal life and various indulgences, leading to the eventual theft of millions of dollars from the public school system.

Bad Education is a fun ride with great actors who all come together to tell one of those “so crazy it has be to true” stories. This scandal certainly is an example of the things human beings get up to when everyone is content with the status quo and not keen to ask too many questions. Some bits are fictionalized to streamline the plot (for example, Geraldine Viswanathan plays an intrepid student reporter, who is a composite character of all the actual students who broke this story in the high school paper well before it got picked up by national news media), but the real-life story was so over-the-top that you don’t need to do much more to juice up the story. There’s a scene towards the end where you are just staring at Frank’s face for a good long while, and you remember what a phenomenal actor Hugh Jackman is. So give this movie a shot - it’s not like you’re doing anything else this weekend anyway.

Ozark: Money Laundering, Murder, and Mayhem

When NYC went into lockdown, the first thing I said was, “Well, I guess this is when I finally start to binge watch Ozark!” Six weeks later, I have completed all three seasons (the third season dropped in the middle of the lockdown so that was one less cliffhanger for me to deal with!) and now I understand what all the buzz was about. It definitely isn’t a show you can binge watch, but it’s a perfect prestige drama to dole out to yourself throughout the week when you just want to experience some twisty dark mayhem.

First up, confession: I work for a bank and am certified as an anti-money laundering specialist, so that fueled a lot of my initial interest in this show. It is centered on Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman), a financial advisor in Chicago, who has a real flair for moving money around. While that flair was initially used for good, it eventually became far more profitable to advise members of a Mexican drug cartel and start laundering their money. However, while the work is profitable, it certainly isn’t safe, and circumstances arise that lead to Marty moving his entire family to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, where he must continue to launder money for the cartel. Unfortunately, the FBI is now onto him, which means he has to placate his druglord boss, whilst evading the Feds, all of which necessitates some pretty fancy laundering techniques. I definitely wished this show had been around when I was studying for my certification because it would have been far more interesting than my study guides about placement, layering, and integration.

While the focus of Season One is more on Marty’s schemes and gradually acquiring the businesses that he will be using as fronts, Season Two and beyond become much more of an ensemble effort, where the women take over. From the outset, the show’s standout character is Ruth Langmore (the incomparable Julia Garner), a bright young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, who becomes Marty’s mentee and right-hand woman. She comes from a family of screw-ups and has no qualms about engaging in illegal activity, but damnit, she’s going to do it well and with a great deal of loyalty. And then we have the glorious Laura Linney as Marty’s wife, Wendy. At first, Wendy seems like a bored housewife who has been swept up in her husband’s drama. But oh boy. This marriage is a partnership and Wendy quickly starts to take over the reigns of the entire operation.

Lest I forget, we also have the Byrdes’ children, Jonah and Charlotte (Skylar Gaertner and Sophia Hublitz), who start off as innocent kids with no idea what their parents are up to, and then quickly become resigned to being part of a vast criminal enterprise. As a friend joked to me when I started watching this show, at times Ozark feels like you’re watching Arrested Development, if Michael Bluth had become a money launderer. Bateman plays Marty as a calm and quiet man; he knows that he has gotten in too deep, but the only way he can protect his family is to keep digging deeper, and as his entire family is roped into his schemes, there’s just a look of comically weary resignation on his face. This show is so dramatic and dark (both figuratively and literally - you might have to turn up the contrast on your TV screens to enjoy every dimly lit scene) but it also features some wonderfully funny moments when everything is so chaotic and impossible that the characters just have to shrug and go along with the madness.

The writing on this show is truly excellent - there are season-long arcs, but each episode is also a self-contained thrill ride, and there is a LOT to keep track of. This can be daunting, but if you let yourself soak in this world, you’ll be able to keep up. I haven’t mentioned even half the cast of characters you will encounter, but suffice to say, every single person on this show is a vivid, complex bag of dueling motivations and you will never know what side they’re on until they’re either murdering someone, or getting killed themselves. Yeah, let me warn you, this isn’t just some academic treatise on financial crime. This show starts to rack up a fairly substantial body count as you go along. And in great televisual fashion, it usually saves up the chaos for the final few episodes of each season, which means you won’t be able to resist hitting Play to see what happens next.

Ozark is a classic example of the golden age of television: intricately plotted, filled with complicated characters, and always finding new ways to pull the rug out from under you and leave you wanting more. Season 3 ended with many cliffhangers and now I will be like everyone else who has had to wait for Netflix to dole out the next installment. It will be a long wait, but it will be so worth it.

Never Have I Ever: The Indian-American Show of My Dreams

Let me explain how much I was looking forward to the release of Lang Fisher and Mindy Kaling's new Netflix series, Never Have I Ever: I specifically took the day off work today so I could bingewatch it all. And now I'm here blogging about it and telling you it is just as great as I hoped it would be (actually, greater), and you should drop everything you're doing and watch it too. Come on, no one's going on vacation any time soon, so you might as well take a holiday to indulge in this televisual treat.

The show is centered on Devi (newcomer Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who is all set to be the next teen sensation), an Indian-American high schooler in California, who had a pretty brutal end to her freshman year. And when I say "brutal," I don't just mean teen bullying, I mean that her father died and she subsequently was psychosomatically paralyzed for three months until she finally got up from her wheelchair and was fine. But don't worry, we get through all of that in a breezy five minutes in the first episode. I swear this is actually a comedy. And by the way, the whole thing has voiceover narration from John McEnroe. Which, I know, sounds so bizarre, but trust me, it's hilarious. There is no better voiceover for the trials and tribulations of a dramatic brown girl than John McEnroe.

Devi lives with her dermatologist mother, Nalini (Poorna Jagannathan, who should get twenty Supporting Actress awards for this role), a strict South Asian mom who is trying to figure out how to raise an American teenager all by herself. Devi's cousin, Kamala (Richa Moorjani), is also living with them while she studies engineering at Caltech. So what you have are three Indian women who are having three very different experiences of what it means to be Indian in America. Nalini is the older immigrant, who came over here with very traditional notions of living the American dream, while her daughter was born and raised in the States and therefore has very different notions of what you are meant to be doing in high school. Kamala lies somewhere in the middle of that spectrum - having grown up in India, she is fairly traditional like Nalini, and wants to please her family, but now that she's got a taste of freedom in America, some of those traditions may not stick.

The show is an absolute delight in the way that it plays with every aspect of Devi's identity and the clash between the life she lives at home versus the life she leads at school. This show jumps right in with the raunchy premise that Devi wants to have sex this year, and this girl does not pull any punches. She is, of course, a straight-A student with a slew of extracurriculars, and she sets about excelling in this particular venture like any other. Which brings us to the romantic complications that are at the heart of any show created by Mindy Kaling. There is an extremely hot boy that Devi is lusting after (who happens to be half-Japanese, just to add some more fun diversity into the mix), and then there's her extremely annoying childhood rival. It's pretty clear how things are going to pan out there, but rather than the classic Darcy-Wickham conundrum, this situation is a little less black and white. Both boys are immensibly likeable whilst carrying plenty of emotional baggage, and it will certainly be fun to see how things go in future seasons. 

But the focus of this first season is Devi. She's in therapy to deal with her father's death (with Niecy Nash playing the therapist we all wish we had), and the season builds to some important breakthroughs that are needed for our heroine to really get her life back on track. The last few episodes are definitely emotional, but this is first and foremost a splendid comedy. This show feels like it was written by a bunch of people who truly love a great one-liner. It is eminently quotable, brimming with excellent jokes even when it is serving a heaping dose of emotional upheaval. My favorite is Episode 4, where Devi has to celebrate Ganesh Puja with her family and fully lean into her Indianness. There's the cool pundit, the shunned divorcee, the "aunties" who aren't related to you by blood but have lots of opinions about your life that you have to politely listen to because you're Indian. She talks about how she can feel too Indian and then subsequently not Indian enough, and she hates all of it. Girl, preach.

Never Have I Ever is a poignant, witty, and sharply-observed comedy that will delight all brown people and will certainly introduce everyone else to what their Indian friends and colleagues go through every day. There are so many throwaway details, like everyone leaving their shoes outside the building before a puja, or the family eating dosas for dinner, or when Devi's mom calls her "kanna." The production and costume design are a whimsical delight, as with any Kaling show. The cast are all incredible and never feel like caricatures. I haven't even discussed Ramona Young and Lee Rodriguez, who play Devi's best friends, Eleanor and Fabiola; they introduce even more diversity into the mix and liven up the proceedings with their own family dramas. And yet, everyone comes together to make this messy, vibrant, loving world. While the point of this show might be to shine a spotlight on Indian Americans and the various weird things we get up to, the ultimate plot is that we're all still struggling with the same old universal dilemmas. It's about knowing yourself, managing your relationships, and getting through adversity. Never have I ever loved a show so much. 

Breeders and #blackAF: Frustrated Family Sitcoms

A lot of people are currently stuck at home with little kids and losing their minds. For those people, the quarantine has magically offered up two wonderful "comedies" about the frustrations of marriage and parenthood. While these shows are two very different beasts, they both feature sweary adults who are constantly on the edge - which is a condition that most of us can relate to, whether we are isolating with our families or are all by ourselves. The creators really lucked out when their shows dropped just in time for a global pandemic when we all desperately need some dark comedies to binge through.

Breeders: Martin Freeman and Daisy Haggard star as Paul and Ally, a couple living in London with two young children. Paul is perpetually frustrated with his kids; nothing can ever go according to schedule, and every day is yet another struggle of finding lost toys, persuading the kids to sleep, dealing with school drama, and trying to find the spare moment to be an adult. Alongside Freeman, the other co-creators of this show are Chris Addison and Simon Blackwell, names you may recognize from their work on Veep, or its British predecessor, The Thick of It. So the language on this show should come as no surprise. Freeman is swearing up a storm at his unruly children and if you are currently stuck in endless Zoom conferences with colleagues or getting supremely annoyed at joggers who won't maintain a six-foot distance when you're on on your daily walk, you might want to live vicariously through Paul and revel in the litany of inventive cursing that every episode brings.

While the first few episodes are hilarious, this is also a very dark show because it has a foothold in reality. Yes, Paul and Ally's frustrations with their kids and each other can boil over in comically heightened ways, but they also boil over in the very traditional ways that occur when the people you love and spend the most time with get under your skin. I've watched the first eight episodes and have no idea what might happen in the final two episodes of the season, but I suspect it will be something dark, sobering, but still insanely funny. Which is certainly the kind of tone I'm looking for in my entertainment these days.

#blackAF: The title says it all, right? From creator Kenya Barris, who also stars as himself (somewhat fictionalized, though I doubt by much), you can basically summarize this show as: black-ish but with a lot more swearing. Ergo, the replacement of "ish" with "AF." I love black-ish and have never missed an episode, but apparently what I was missing was a hilarious meta commentary of the show's creator and his family where every single episode title proclaims that "this episode is about slavery." It is an insane and wild ride through the black experience when you're an affluent black family who has "made it" but still holds a lot of baggage personally, culturally, and socioeconomically. You will recognize every single one of the members of this family from black-ish, because again, both shows are based on Barris' actual family, but now everyone is just extra real and ready to tell you about the struggle.

Rashida Jones also stars as Barris' wife, Joya (she plays a former lawyer, as opposed to Barris' real-life doctor wife), and she is a delight. I've never seen Jones in a role where she got to lean into her blackness and now it feels like the gloves have come off and she is ready to outdo Barris in his constant racial commentary. The two of them are excellent and the actors who play their kids are incredible as well, lending depth and frankness to this portrayal of a black family that is enjoying a lot of privilege but still encountering the barriers of systemic racism in interesting and nuanced ways. The women of the family also have their struggles with feminism, and while the show is always going to be first and foremost about black identity (and slavery), it also delves deep into the other complicated and intersecting identities of its characters. It is super meta, super smart, and insanely funny. And like Breeders, while over the top, it is also very grounded in reality, so while you laugh, you will also uncomfortably squirm. I have already bingewatched six episodes in a day, so clearly, I can't give you any higher recommendation than that. 

Jawaani Jaaneman & Maska: Bollywood Pandemic Viewing

Still stuck at home and scrambling for new things to watch? Maybe now’s the time to dive into some Bollywood escapism. This weekend, I contributed a review of two movies, Jawaani Jaaneman (which you can find on Amazon Prime) and Maska (available on Netflix), to the fabulous BollyBrit website as their newest contributor. So please head on over to this link to check out those reviews.

If you want the one-minute review: they are both light and frothy and are good pandemic viewing. Maska, however, is good regardless of whether you’re in quarantine, while Jawaani Jaaneman is more the sort of thing you start to tolerate after a month of self-isolation. So go forth and get your Bollywood on!

Uncorked: Refreshing and Crisp

Uncorked is a perfect #QuarantineAndChill movie. It's on Netflix, it boasts a splendid cast, and a witty, loving script by writer-director Prentice Penny. If you are going stir-crazy in self-isolation and think you've watched all of Netflix, think again. This movie is a breath of fresh air (which is great if you are not allowed to leave the house to get any literal fresh air). 

Mamoudou Athie plays Elijah, a man who works at his family's local barbecue restaurant in Tennessee as well at a wine store. He loves wine, as evidenced by the way he recommends it to a novice who enters his shop looking for a bottle of wine: when he asks her what kind, she says, "a good one?" which leads to a delightful interlude where he explains the different kinds of wine to her by comparing them to hip-hop artists. Elijah is torn between his desire to follow his passion and his father's expectation that he will take over the family restaurant. That is certainly a classic trope - personal ambition versus familial obligation - but nothing about this movie feels forced or hackneyed. Instead, it's a warm and surprising movie about how hard it can be to figure out what your dreams are, and then the cost of pursuing them.

Two things make this movie stand out: the cast, and the script. Elijah's mother and father (Sylvia and Louis) are played by Niecy Nash and Courtney B. Vance, and they are the ultimate power couple. Sylvia is all about supporting her son and encouraging him with this "Somalia" thing (No, mom, it has nothing to do with Africa, I want to be a "sommelier"). Louis is dismissive, assuming this is yet another flight of fancy his millennial son has taken up. The script is full of sly jokes and a lot of heart, with little one-liners and asides that make each character feel fully realized. Everyone has a little backstory, some quirk or family drama that is driving their decisions, and as the movie progresses, it is delicious to watch the story come alive with all these different notes. It's a deeply human story and resonates in this time when we are all yearning for more connection. 

Uncorked is also emphatically a movie about wine. It seems clear to me that Prentice Penny must be a wine connoisseur on the verge of being a master sommelier himself because there is so much love in every shot of a glass of wine being poured, swirled, and sipped. But this is alongside a great story about a working-class man pursuing what is decidedly considered an upper-class passion. There are so many hurdles in Elijah's way, whether they be personal, familial, or socioeconomic, but ultimately, this is a story about a man who has found the thing he is meant to be doing with his life. During this quarantine, may we all be so lucky to have such epiphanies. And if not, at least we can forget our cares for a few hours and watch this charming movie.