 Once upon a time, before it inevitably collapsed under the crushing weight of its own convoluted plot machinations, Pretty Little Liars was one of the most enjoyable shows on TV, a near pitch-perfect blend of heightened teen melodrama and fizzy-pop mystery-thriller. Freeform, knowing they had a major hit on their hands, milked the show for all it was worth, cranking out an almost unfathomable 160 episodes (to put that in perspective, that’s almost 90 episodes more than Game of Thrones ran, and I can assure you that Westeros is a far more expansive world than Rosewood, Pennsylvania). Forced to contrive new ways to keep the narrative plates spinning as its premise was stretched into limp taffy, the show became an exhaustive endurance test long before it reached the finish line.
Following two short-lived spin-offs (Ravenswood and The Perfectionists), the franchise has been ported to HBO Max with a new iteration that has little to do with the original (aside from taking place in the neighboring town of Millwood). Pregnant teen Imogen (Bailee Madison) finds herself at the mercy of a texting tormentor known simply as “A,” along with her cinephile pal Tabby (Chandler Kinney) and three other girls - uptight ballerina Faran (Zaria), sheltered tech geek Mouse (Malia Pyles), and juvenile delinquent Noa (Maia Reficco). The five of them come to learn that their mothers were once Millwood High’s reigning mean girl clique and they had some sort of hand in the suicide of a troubled girl named Angela Waters… seemingly passing their sins onto their daughters, who now find themselves caught in a fiendish morality play in present day. The leads don’t enjoy the instant chemistry that Lucy Hale, Ashley Benson, Shay Mitchell and Troian Bellisario did in the original… but their rapport grows stronger and more assured over the course of the season. Each of the five girls acquits herself well on-screen, but Kinney’s the most compelling presence… even though she bears the brunt of the watered-down, Kevin Williamson-style meta dialogue (“You know I’m a Dream Warriors girl,” she quips in regards to a Nightmare on Elm Street reference). Original Sin is less fun than the original Pretty Little Liars, and that has a lot to do with the creators embracing a surprisingly grungy, torture-porn-in-training aesthetic. A lumbering masked killer looms on the fringes (probably meant to call to mind Leatherface, but more reminiscent of former WWE star Kane); the opening credits evoke the grubby aesthetics of Seven, with a version of the theme song that sounds as if it were remixed by Trent Reznor during a spare lunch hour; dilapidated box cars and a decrepit house of horrors make up the show’s unsettling locations. There are some limp subplots (Noa thinks her boyfriend might be taking performance enhancing drugs; Tabby’s film teacher is a fuddy duddy who doesn’t appreciate Jordan Peele) and a sexual assault component that feels largely agenda-driven, but also some impressive touches - such as Mouse’s trans boyfriend Ash, whose identity is barely remarked upon, refreshingly… or Faran’s complicated relationship with her mother and her dancing (even if it’s hilarious that this random, small-town high school has what feels like a fully-stocked professional ballet company). Kudos as well to the handling of Mallory Bechtel as identical twins Karen and Kelly Beasley, who don’t impact the plot quite as obviously as you might expect - particularly when one of them strays afoul of "A" early on. The best thing about the show, however, is its tightly controlled plotting across ten episodes - it achieves something the original Pretty Little Liars couldn’t, and that’s offer an actual resolution to its core mystery. Of course, it lays the groundwork for a second season (which has already gotten a green light)… but if its predecessor were any indication, Original Sin might want to quit while it’s ahead - for all our sakes.
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10/17/2022 0 Comments She-Hulk: attorney at law (season 1) She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, more than any other Marvel series on Disney Plus, feels fully at ease within its own televised skin. It’s so eager to get past the obligations of its origin story, that the pilot episode amounts to a plotting blitzkrieg. Jennifer Walters (Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany) is a rising star in the DA’s office and, perhaps more notably, the cousin of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) - better known as the Hulk. When they get into a car wreck (due to a barely explained encounter with a Sakaaran spacecraft), some of Bruce’s gamma-radiated blood drips onto Jen’s wounded forearm, unleashing her “inner green”… but she soon realizes that a) she remains both calm and fully lucid while in Hulk form and b) she has complete control over the transformation (Jen quips that this is because women have a lot more experience keeping their emotions in check - cue the triggered taking angrily to Twitter with pitchforks). Bruce offers a crash-course in being a superhero, but Jen is content to simply return to her legal career, eventually starting a new gig heading up the “superhuman law division” at the firm of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzburg & Holliway… where her first case is overseeing the parole hearing of Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), aka The Abomination (who obviously has his own Hulk-related history). It quickly becomes clear that She-Hulk, as a series, is similarly content with life as an episodic and predominately low-stakes comic book-flavored legal sitcom - Ally McBeal with superpowers, rather than miniskirts. You should be able to determine fairly quickly if you’re on the show’s comedic wavelength or not… but even if you are, and find the series to be a refreshing and much-needed change of pace from the standard Marvel offerings, it’s hard to deny that most of these episodes just sort of flit through one ear and out the other - their impressions largely mayfly-esque (one episode revolves entirely around Jen creating a “She-Hulk” dating profile; another sees her taking pseudo-nemesis Titania to court for attempting to trademark her superhero moniker). The main reason to watch, unquestionably, is Maslany. Members of “Clone Club” (the nickname for the Orphan Black fanbase) have been waiting impatiently for the Emmy-winning actress to land a worthy follow-up project, and if She-Hulk isn’t really a showcase for her astonishingly flexible dramatic range, it does remind just how fleet of foot she is comedically. It’s a good thing too, because Maslany is tasked with most of the heavy lifting here. The supporting cast is surprisingly slight. Ginger Gonzaga is cute as Jen’s ever-loyal BFF/paralegal, but is never anything more than that, while the always-reliable Renee Elise Goldsberry is underutilized as Jen’s fellow attorney Mallory Book (meanwhile, it’s anyone’s guess why so much screentime is lavished on Dennis, Jen’s incredibly lame and cartoonishly sexist colleague at the DA’s office, though Griffin Matthews is a nice addition as a haughty purveyor of designer superhero threads). Probably of greater interest is the unapologetic parade of Marvel characters - while some might be disheartened that Tim Roth, an especially nasty villain from the early, less micromanaged days of the MCU, has finally been brought back, only to be reconceived as a reformed wellness guru (legally forbidden from becoming the Abomination), the overwhelming standout is Charlie Cox. Freed of the grim baggage of his Daredevil series on Netflix, he has such easy charm, and such obvious chemistry with Maslany, it’s hard not to pine for some sort of Jen Walters/Matt Murdock spin-off in which they try cases by day and fight crime by night. In spite of She-Hulk’s more modest ambitions, it grapples with the concept of female agency in unexpected and revealing ways - both in an immediate sense (Jen eschewing a conventional superhero arc in favor of the legal profession, while coming to terms with her newfound powers in her own unique fashion) and a thematic one (subverting the traditional expectations of the comic book genre, and the meticulously honed Marvel formula in particular). Which brings us to the season finale, which was… wildly polarizing, to say the least.
Up to this point, the show had engaged in light bursts of meta-humor and 4th-wall breaking (Jen, after Benedict Wong makes a cameo appearance - “God, everybody loves Wong. It’s like giving the show Twitter armor for a week!”). People’s tolerance levels for this Deadpool-style of self-aware (and self-satisfied) quipping varied, of course, but it was - at best - perfectly amusing and - at worst - mostly harmless. The finale, however, purposefully jumps the meta-rails and hurtles clean off the track. As is so often the case with today’s pop cultural discourse, the truth lies at neither of the two extremes people are so quick to migrate towards (see above). Much of the episode proves legitimately clever (particularly when the show somehow manages a detour across the Disney Plus homepage)… but ultimately things stray perhaps a step too far into faux-defiant “biting the hand that feeds you” territory, all while winking feverishly and reassuringly at the audience (cue the Kathryn Hahn meme from WandaVision). Nonetheless, the season ends much as it began - on its own terms, with Jen Walters looking to exert control both literally and figuratively over her own TV show. And whatever you might think of the series, you can’t really hold that against her.
10/3/2022 0 Comments Paper Girls (Season 1) It might seem condescending to describe Amazon’s Paper Girls, adapted from the comic book by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, as a “junior varsity Stranger Things”… but categorizing the show as the younger, spunkier, brattier cousin of the Netflix juggernaut is very much meant as a compliment.
The parallels in premise speak for themselves. Like Stranger Things, Paper Girls is set in a seemingly nondescript midwestern town (Stony Stream, Ohio to be specific) in the 1980s… and like Stranger Things, it revolves around a quartet of 12-year-olds (swapping out boys for girls) who get swept up in an unlikely paranormal adventure… while on their bikes. The titular foursome have virtually nothing in common when we first meet them, aside from their paper routes. Shy, Chinese-American Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) is starting her first day on the job and soon makes the acquaintance of tech-savvy Tiffany (Camryn Jones) and field hockey star KJ (Fina Strazza), who’s ambivalent over her family’s prominent social standing… which makes her a convenient target for Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), who’s basically from the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks. Navigating the notoriously-fraught early morning hours post-Halloween, the four girls see a strange light in the sky and next thing they know, they’ve been inadvertently transported to the year 2019, caught in the middle of some sort of cross-dimensional time war. Stranger Things began with relatively simple building blocks (a sinister government lab; a monster from another dimension; a girl with special powers), but Paper Girls, in many ways, takes the opposite approach, plunging the viewer into a convoluted mythology involving factions with portentous names such as The Old Watch and The STF Underground. But the show is smart enough to keep its focus entirely on the girls, who epitomize the concept of ordinary characters thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Its four young actresses are unconventional leads, and each of them is outstanding in her own way. Rosinsky seemingly has the showiest role - and makes the most of it - but it’s Fina Strazza who makes the most indelible impression; her KJ is the quiet, thoughtful center of the group, and yet also arguably its fiercest member. When she declares “We’re Paper Girls… and we stick together” during the season finale, it’s a battle cry that resonates across the entire series. Aside from the impetus to find a way home, much of the first season drama revolves around the girls coming to terms with facets of their future - both welcome and unwelcome. Erin is brought face-to-face with herself as a neurotic, self-medicating adult (a smartly cast Ali Wong) still living in her childhood home, while Mac is thrown by the revelation that her burnout brother grew up to become a successful surgeon (the reason *why* he became a successful surgeon even more troubling). The best by far though is Tiffany landing in 1999 and locking horns with her insufferably chill 20-something self (played by Sekai Abeni), who seemingly threw away their childhood dreams of MIT to become a part-time DJ. This all proves much more compelling than the actual Time War, which remains fuzzily sketched throughout the first season and is mostly distilled into a single Old Watch agent (Adina Porter) pursuing the girls with Terminator-like determination (in one of the show’s few missteps, an attempt to turn the very funny Jason Mantzoukas into the Old Watch’s sinister “Big Bad” doesn’t entirely land... though he does have one standout moment in which he uses Mac's mixtape as a metaphor for the space-time continuum). Paper Girls is far less reliant on 80s nostalgia and cultural referencing than Stranger Things, but moments of Brian K. Vaughan-inspired wit shine through (in 2019, Tiffany ruminates on the fact that “Weird Al is dead,” then admits she’s talking about her pet hamster, not the singer, who Erin assures her is probably just “middle-aged”). The season, not surprisingly, builds to a cliffhanger (one that hints that time travel may not be the arbitrary plot catalyst it initially appeared)… but, disappointingly, Amazon has already pulled the plug on a second season. Alas. Such is the relentless barrage of content in the streaming era that premature cancellations are rarely dwelled on for long or with much in the way of genuine mourning… but the demise of this extremely promising series does leave a more bitter tang than most. |
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