Step Aside, Movies. It's TV Season

#218: Previewing upcoming TV shows, "The Boston Strangler," "Inside," "Jackie Brown," "Daisy Jones and The Six"

Mar 24, 2023

`Edition 218:`

Hey movie lovers!

As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!

This week: Who cares about movies these days…in the spring it’s all about television. We’ll discuss the phenomenon of TV season and set the table for a mad blitz of new shows premiering. I do have two new movies from this week to talk about after, plus I recommend the TV show I’m currently loving. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Tommy Wiseau steps back into the directing chair.

Welcome To TV Season 2023

The Oscars are over, and movies have receded into a period of quiet introspection.

Three straight superhero movies have disappointed at the box office, and the first whispers have begun creeping around the periphery of culture that perhaps the bubble is bursting. I can’t wait. The most obvious alternative, an ambitious CGI-drive action adventure movie led by a movie star — I’m talking of course about Adam Driver-led 65 — is performing even worse. The industry has returned to its default mode of complaining that the sky is falling.

I’m not sure the general public cares much about this existential panic, because a new annual tradition has taken shape in the past few years. From early March to the end of May is officially TV season.

The reason for this is quite simple. The eligibility window for the Emmy Awards closes on May 31, and much like the end-of-year cutoff for the Oscars creates a distinct movie season, prestige shows want to create maximum hype as close to the deadline as possible (this logic hasn’t exactly proven out, as the last two Best Picture winners were released a full six months or more before the date, but I digress).

Last year was the first in which the oversupply of TV shows felt truly impossible to ignore. My friends, casual yet consistent TV watchers like everyone these days, told me they felt overwhelmed. I wrote a newsletter around then listing 11 NEW shows that felt like must-watch projects (and eight more returning shows).

Even just from when I started this newsletter in 2018 to now, my stance on TV vs. movies has changed drastically. It’s no longer even mildly interesting to point out that many of the great shows each year would’ve been movies in past decades. We all know that. So as a fan of great storytelling, the kind we rarely find in movies anymore, I’ve chosen to embrace the TV glut.

Big picture though, I think TV season is a bad idea. With movies, the delineation between what’s popular and what wins awards is clear, so even though the “good” movies are released so close together that no one can keep up, the critics and industry people will eventually separate the wheat from the chaff for the rest of us (or they’ll be wrong and we’ll end up celebrating some bad move for three months straight). Viewers who want to eventually catch up.

In television, that doesn’t happen. Would you like to know how many of the 19 shows I listed last year I ended up watching all the way through? Only one. That speaks to the transient nature of TV. It feels important in the moment and disposable in the past. I feel zero motivation to catch up on last year’s “The Dropout,” for example, even though I heard it was pretty good. So come June or July this year , dozens of shows will be ignored and forgotten.

This actually hurts the show’s chances for awards, too. When it comes to the Emmys, and TV in general, popularity and awards celebration walk hand-in-hand. “Modern Family,” the type of show that wouldn’t be respected by the film Academy, had 22 Emmy wins. “Game of Thrones” won 59 Emmys. So if your show is great but doesn’t capture the cultural zeitgeist, you’re not going to take home the trophies either.

TV executives will catch on to this, if they haven’t already, and I think the phenomenon of TV season will end in relatively short order — helped along by the mass cancellations and tightening pocket books at several streamers over the past few months.

But for now, prepare to hear about dozens of different shows your friends swear are amazing that you’ll never get around to. To prepare you, I’ve compiled a very incomplete list of shows with legitimate awards aspirations, coming out during TV season 2023:

Notable Returning:

Notable Debuting:

The cinephile in me wishes even just one of these 17 projects was a movie, since over the same upcoming two month span the movie release calendar looks pretty bare. Any of these looks like the type of movie I’d love to watch and dissect in this newsletter. Alas, now they’re taking a back seat. If you all watch any of these shows and particularly love them, let me know! If I hear enough noise I’ll be forced to check it out too.

Something New

Boston Strangler (Hulu): When I previewed this movie in “Trailer Watch” a few weeks ago, I said I’d never turn down another chance for journalists to be portrayed on screen as beautiful, superheroic truthtellers. Well, dear reader, I was wrong. Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon star as undoubtedly beautiful and superheroic journalists investigating a string of murders in early 1960s Boston, but this was both my least favorite movie of 2023 so far and perhaps the worst depiction of journalism in a movie that I’ve ever seen.
There’s little utility in me telling you why you shouldn’t watch a movie you likely weren’t going to watch anyway, but suffice it to say almost anything of utility in this movie was stolen from either Zodiac or Spotlight, bringing nothing new to the already-abundant genres of serial killers movies and mystery/investigation movies. As for the journalism, we see our heroine publishing rumors beneath inflammatory headlines based on the accounts of potentially untrustworthy single source, we see her crusading for a cause rather than covering it, and attempting to solve the murders herself rather than report on the investigation. One could make a pretty convincing argument that the stories written in this movie actually made it far more difficult to solve the case, and in the bleakest point of view, even inspired additional copycat murders. If you want a movie about a pair of awesome, real-life female journalists, please go watch She Said instead!

Inside (Theaters): It’s a tantalizing premise — Willem Dafoe as a master thief who breaks into an uber-rich guy’s NYC apartment to steal valuable artwork, only to get locked inside. It’s one of those solo acting showcases, a la Castaway, but with all the isolationist chaos Dafoe showed in The Lighthouse (with 100% less fart humor…unfortunately). It’s compelling, but it almost feels experimental. I know I complain about patronizing exposition in most movies, but this movie has ZERO context, or really any story whatsoever, which holds it back from being anything exceptional. It’s an actor’s dream to get this much material to chew on, and Dafoe is great, but anyone who’s ever been to a one-man show theater experience knows how self-indulgent of an exercise it can be. This is another small movie that was worth the try but not worth your time.

Something Old

Jackie Brown (1997): News “broke” or “leaked” this week that Quentin Tarantino has completed the script for what he continues to claim will be his 10th and final movie. It created buzz, not just because of the year-round QT hype machine, but because it’s supposedly called The Movie Critic and could focus on a Pauline Kael-like figure in 1970s Hollywood (announced the same week longtime New York Times critic A.O. Scott steps back…strategic).
That premise doesn’t sound very Tarantino-y, at least as far as the hyper-violent, hyper-masculine style we associate with him. But I’d point viewers to this late 90s, female-led epic for reference. This was QT’s third movie after Reservation Dogs and Pulp Fiction anointed him as the coolest filmmaker on the planet, and he used his clout to make a two-and-a-half hour movie adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel about a double-crossing flight attendant working as a money smuggler. This is the movie of his that many people haven’t seen, and I think it lacks only slightly because it doesn’t come entirely from QT’s wacky brilliant brain, but for those aspiring cinephiles who have never watched a filmmakers entire library, his is an achievable and rewarding challenge. Plus, Robert De Niro’s parking lot scene (if you know you know) is one of the most memorable movie moments of all time.

Something to Stream

Daisy Jones and The Six (Amazon Prime): In our fragmented TV marketplace, we often gravitate toward what appeals to our specific interests. For me, 70s rock is always going to be a soft spot. So the show I’m currently watching and loving is “Daisy Jones and The Six,” an adaptation of a best-selling novel inspired by the Fleetwood Mac drama that led to the creation of their groundbreaking “Rumors” album.
The casting and production design alone make this show worth watching, as the creation of this world feels so incredibly tangible and alluring. The story within is good, if somewhat broad and obvious, but with a 10-hour commitment vs the two-hour movie, the value of “a good hang” cannot be underestimated. Also, the original music within the show, written in real life by Marcus Mumford, Phoebe Bridgers, Jackson Browne among others, is great. Highly recommend this show for any fans of my all-time personal favorite movie, Almost Famous.

Trailer Watch: Big Shark

I can’t believe I actually get to type these words, but here we go: Tommy Wiseau is making another movie. If you’ve ever seen The Room, or perhaps The Disaster Artist about the making of The Room, then you know how big of a deal this is. It’s been 20 years since the legendary cult classic was first released, and audiences have changed drastically in the intervening years. If anything, I think people today are more willing to embrace the ironic bad-ness (see: M3GAN). The question with Wiseau was always how “in on the joke” he was about his movie being bad, and after seeing this trailer that speculation begins anew.

No Content For Old Men

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