Still Watching...Or Not.
"Under the Bridge," "We Were the Lucky Ones," "Parish," a few more written words on "Shōgun" and even more thoughts on "Fallout." Plus more.
It feels like there’s been an inordinate amount of new shows where “good” or “pretty good” is the ceiling, and that means that a lot of time has been spent watching these shows and exerting energy rooting for them to make a leap, entertainingly or creatively.
Rah, show. Go, show. Be better!
It can be a bit exhausting and ever so slightly disappointing, if your hope is that everything you watch be great, which is always mine. I don’t tune in and think, “I really hope this is solidly average.”
On the plus side, sometimes when you stick with something that’s underperforming, it rallies — maybe a little late on the excellence, but you appreciate the forces of time and story coming together eventually.
Let’s get to some examples.
“We Were the Lucky Ones,” Hulu.
The seventh (of eight) episode of this limited series rolled out Thursday and if you’ve been there from the start the effort has become vastly more rewarding, fighting both through the bleakness and the disparate storylines to some kind of hope.
Based on Georgia Hunter’s immensely popular and important bestselling book about the Holocaust (and on her family), this sprawling epic almost feels in the first few episodes that it has too much story to tell — tracking a large Jewish family separated by World War II is a massive undertaking and much is demanded of the viewer.
“We Were the Lucky Ones” follows the Kurc family, Jews in Poland at a slight remove from the hostility pre-war, but exposed to all kinds of torment and harsh conditions as the war starts. The series focuses initially on three siblings; youngest daughter Halina (Joey King), middle brother Addy (Logan Lerman) and oldest brother Genek (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), children of Sol (Lior Ashkenazi) and Nechuma (Robin Weigert), which would normally be enough material to engage viewers as the lives of the Kurcs are quickly upended and scattered at the start of the war.
But this is a story where everyone matters — other siblings, wives, husbands, cousins, their wives and husbands, friends, distant relatives, etc. — and this tapestry is absolutely essential in telling the entirety of “We Were the Lucky Ones” and dramatizing how one family mostly managed to survive when others were completely wiped out. It doesn’t, however, make things easy and by dint of so many storylines everything in the early episodes feels as if the strands go sideways instead of forward.
I felt like the weight of the story in the first four episodes created a natural sense of importance and heft, but at that point hadn’t become compelling viewing just yet. That’s a big ask, of course, when there are so many other offerings out there.
That’s not to suggest at all that a story about the Holocaust needs to be entertaining — but on well-covered ground there has to be something unique (as in the movie “The Zone Of Interest”).
That said, the uniqueness of “We Were the Lucky Ones” is the epic scope and almost mind-boggling, odds-defying, true story of survival. And after that fourth episode, the detailed groundwork lends itself to the emotional impact to come.
Early on, it wasn’t so much that I wanted the miniseries to move at a faster clip, just one that was a step or two quicker — no need to jog or even race, but a brisk and less disjointed story would have been helpful. But scattered and disjointed is also the heart of the story, which in many ways handicaps the options, does it not?
Investing in the story pays off in the second half of the miniseries and anyone who stayed with it (concluding next week) will find the rewards. This is one example where wanting something to be better eventually succeeds with patience.
“Under the Bridge,” Hulu.
After three episodes of the true-crime miniseries, “Under the Bridge,” based on the bestselling book by Rebecca Godfrey, pacing is clearly not the problem. But there’s definitely an issue here.
You’ve got two very good actresses — Riley Keough (“The Girlfriend Experience,” “Daisy Jones and the Six”) as Godfrey, who grew up in a small British Columbia town and comes back from New York to write a book about troubled teen girls); and Oscar-nominated Lily Gladstone (“Killers Of the Flower Moon”) as a local cop who grew up with and had a relationship with Godfrey; that acting duo is your clear bonus.
The issue is that “Under the Bridge” has to focus on a coterie of disaffected youth and that can lead to all kinds of trouble if, say, one or more of the actors leans a little too far into their role or one or two others don’t yet have the chops to avoid looking like weak links, which at this point is definitely an issue.
“Under the Bridge” is driven in the first three episodes by the outsized wildness of bad-girl ringleader Josephine, played by Chloe Guidry, and your mileage may certainly vary with Guidry’s performance.
I’m struggling with wanting Gladstone’s character to have more range and depth while wishing Guidry’s would be toned down seven or eight notches. Keough falls somewhere in the middle, partly beguiling as a woman returning to her small town roots trying to make something of herself as a writer, and less beguiling as we see that she might be trying to play all sides of the story — which would take a lot of effort — in a way that comes off as more interior (and dubious) than it would take to pull it off. The real life Godfrey, by many accounts, was a force, but Keough presents her so far as reserved and unsure, prone to ill-advised ideas.
Again, early days, but it’s hard not to want “Under the Bridge” to be better than good, which is currently where it’s floundering.
“Parish,” AMC+.
Unlike the previous series, so far I’ve only watched one episode of the Giancarlo Esposito-led series “Parish,” on AMC+ and it absolutely is not that episode’s fault that I’m probably going to pull the plug on this subscription in the coming days.
As other have noted in the comments, there’s a lot to like on this streamer if you feel like investing. Hell, I even gave one of its series the Two Episode Test, right here:
But, for reasons I can’t quite explain beyond “I just didn’t finish it,” I just didn’t finish “Monsieur Spade,” and while I thought “Parish” was good enough in an overly familiar cable TV kind of way, I also didn’t feel like I would elevate it to a Two Episode Test, having seen enough in the pilot to be realistically sure I wouldn’t finish that one, either.
Hence, the pending plug pulling.
But it’s not entirely the fault of “Parish,” which is based on the UK series, “The Driver,” created by Danny Brocklehurst and Jim Poyser. There’s certainly a part of me that would watch Esposito play an aging getaway driver lured back in for “one final job,” but then again I’d watch Esposito in just about anything, including “The Gentlemen,” a series that hooked me faster and deeper than “Parish” could.
Brocklehurst and Sunu Gonera have teamed up to make this American version, which also stars Paula Malcomson, Zackary Momoh, Skeet Ulrich, but it feels like there’s an awfully long list of people with their fingers in this pie and yet it never really bakes, does it? (A little Brit-centric question at the end of a sentence thing for you).
If you feel like you’ve seen “Parish” before, it’s not just that there was a British version, it’s because the American one seems like something you’ve seen countless times before, only done better in the past.
“The Gentlemen.”
Speaking of “The Gentlemen,” which qualifies as a very, very, delayed transition, YES, I’m still watching. Got a little derailed by things, but so far, so entertaining. Reminder:
“Ripley.”
Same with “Ripley,” which is not only increasing its allure and fleshing out the story but, non-spoiler alert, it still looks gorgeous. As another reminder:
“Shōgun.”
While I have written plenty about this series and even quickly busted out a podcast (why, hello, Bastard Machine Podcast No. 1-ish) on both the series finale and the series as a whole, I wanted to add this thought:
Is there a way for creating forces (like FX) and platforms (like Hulu) to do a — I don’t want to say better so much as maybe less stealthy — educational effort with tons of “extra features” and maybe even links to story explainers that pop up in major papers and on credible websites, so that viewers can engage with that and deepen their appreciation either before they watch or as they watch, rather than finishing a series and discovering later all these intriguing details that might have made you think differently about what you’d just seen?
I don’t have the answer for how to do that properly, but I think there is a way. Everyone who seems to truly love “Shōgun” tracked down, in many instances, supplemental information that improved on their experience.
Anyway, here’s the podcast if you missed it:
“Fallout.”
In my rave about “Fallout” I didn’t say enough about how funny I thought the show was. I bring it up now because I read, heavy sigh, somewhere else a reference from someone who though “Fallout” was really mostly a comedy and that it was too jokey, to which I say:
“No, you’re wrong.”
But I say that a lot. As for the series, I think we just need a nice catch-all repository for shows like this that we bill as “Better Than You Think It Will Be.”
And that reminder:
Oh those pesky typos when you write late at night — luckily I could fix them on the app (and the site), with the press of a button. Another reason to not just read the email version! So this is my reminder to either get the free app, which is great, or click over to the online site. (Which is, as another reminder: timgoodman.substack.com
I agree with you about "We Were the Lucky Ones," it did become cohesive and moving, I have one more episode to go. I can't help but think of it as the story of how the people ended up on the other side of the wall in "Zone of Interest," told in excruciating detail.
I loved Shogun. We are so used to a big battle putting an ending to a story about warfare but I thought the ending was so very appropriate to illuminating the Japanese culture.
I had a bit of a problem getting into Ripley, I found him such a cold fish and too old frankly for the role but it did win me over, not the least of which was because of the gorgeous cinematography. Each frame was exquisitely composed and the period production design was impeccable.