Asking the Wrong Questions

[This post first appeared on Lawyers, Guns & Money, April 26, 2024 ] I have an embarrassing reading habit to confess. A book can sit in my TBR for months, years, decades even, but the thing that will finally persuade me to read it will be the news of a forthcoming film or television adaptation. In the case of Patricia Highsmith's classic novel of psychological suspense and identity theft, The Talented Mr. Ripley , I have somehow outdone myself. I first heard about the book in my teens, when it was adapted to the screen by Anthony Minghella. And so, with every honorable intention of reading the book before watching the movie, I somehow set both aside for a quarter century. It was only this year, when the news broke that Steve Zaillian would be producing a prestige miniseries adaptation of the novel for Netflix, that I finally kept my promise. As is often the case with such extreme procrastination, once the mental block that kept me from picking up The Talented Mr. Ripley was br...

Look, I was not expecting this. Two years and more than a dozen shows into the Disney+ experiment, I think we've all developed a decent enough sense of what to expect from the television incarnations of the two biggest entertainment franchises on the planet. And for the most part, these shows have been  fine . Some fun moments. Some actors who are better than their material. Maybe a hint of a political idea. There was no reason for Andor —a prequel to a prequel whose original premise was already quite dodgy—to be any better. And then it turned out to be good. Not just good for Star Wars , but just plain good. Best TV of the year good. I have to admit that I went a bit Kübler-Ross about this. First there was Anger—this show is too good to be Star Wars . No way does a story this smart, this thoughtful about the compromises of life under fascism, and the costs of rising up to resist it, exist only as a lead-in to a floppy-haired teenager doing an amusement park ride. Then a bit of...

I had no intention of watching HBO Max's Peacemaker . The whole concept seemed to me indicative of the cynicism and blatant manipulation that characterize this most recent chapter in the lifecycle of the superhero-industrial complex. Superheroes are now the leading product of the increasingly consolidated entertainment empires vying for our money, and each of those empires is now promoting its own streaming platform. Ergo, each superhero property has to function as a launching platform for a spin-off show, be it ever so esoteric and hard to justify artistically. Did you think that The Batman 's take on the Penguin was weird and over-emphasized, a waste of Colin Farrell under a distracting fat suit in a role that could have been played by any character actor in Hollywood? Well, just sit tight for The Penguin , coming to HBO Max in 2023! It would be one thing if these shows were bad and easily ignorable. But the same self-correcting mechanism that allows Marvel to keep chugging a...

When the newly-formed behemoth that was Marvel-Disney announced a full slate of MCU-based TV shows to be streamed exclusively on Disney+, the declaration carried the implicit promise that these new shows would be more closely in line with the MCU movies. The Marvel TV arm had existed for nearly a decade, but its products ran the gamut from forays whose initial promise faded into limp, underperforming slogs (the Defenders shows) to hidden gems with no support from the head office ( Cloak & Dagger ) to utterly misjudged turkeys ( Inhumans ). Now, Kevin Feige and his team of wizards seemed to be promising, the same alchemy that had turned the MCU into the most influential pop culture phenomenon on the planet would be brought to bear on the television medium, with appropriately lavish budgets, movie stars on call, and perhaps most importantly, the same willingness to play with genre and formula that is one of the key components of the MCU's success. We're now six months into t...

Barry Jenkins's ten-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel The Underground Railroad was released in full on Amazon last month, and seems to have promptly sunk like a stone. Beyond a spate of initial ( and mostly effusive ) reviews , discussion of it seems to be nonexistent. My twitter feed spent more time obsessing over Mare of Easttown —a well-made but pedestrian cop thriller (not to mention, heavily derivative of Happy Valley )—than it did over what was supposedly one of the major TV events of the year, the first foray in the medium of an Oscar-winning director, adapting a book that had won a Pulitzer and National Book Award (not to mention, a Clarke Award). There are reasons for this muted response, and we'll get into them in a minute. But for now what's significant about it is that it leaves me feeling bereft, of the conversations I'd like to get into after finishing the show. The Underground Railroad is a stone cold masterpiece, one that not only...

I. The Show WandaVision , Disney+'s strange, engrossing, fitfully effective sitcom parody turned superhero slapfight, which wrapped up its nine-episode run last weekend, begins with what can only be described as an impressive commitment to the bit. As the show opens, Wanda Maximoff, last seen going toe-to-toe with Thanos in the grand battle at the end of Avengers: Endgame , and Vision, last seen being killed by Wanda in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Thanos from disappearing half the life in the universe at the end of Aveners: Infinity War (a death that was then undone by Thanos, who proceeded to kill Vision himself while securing the infinity stone that allowed him to perform the aforementioned disappearing act), are a newlywed couple moving into a charming suburban home in Westview, New Jersey. Except the whole thing is in black and white and in a 4:3 aspect ratio, the costumes and decor are from the 1950s, and there's a laugh track. In other words, it's a classic sitco...