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11/21/2022 0 Comments house of the dragon (season 1)
If nothing else, House of the Dragon seems to have answered the question of whether there’s still an existing appetite for Game of Thrones - something that seemed far from certain following its loudly denounced final season. Set nearly 200 years before the events of HBO’s flagship fantasy series, this prequel saga should appeal to viewers who felt overwhelmed by the sheer sprawl of characters and houses, banners and sigils featured in the original by offering a more focused and bite-sized take on life in the Seven Kingdoms. Think of it as a Westeros starter kit, of sorts.
Largely restricted to King’s Landing and Dragonstone, and revolving almost entirely around the Targaryen clan - at a time when their grip on the Iron Throne was still absolute - the show follows King Viserys (Paddy Considine), a generally capable but somewhat middle-of-the-road ruler whom the realm elected to back over his arguably more suitable (though infinitely more female) cousin Rhaenys (Eve Best) years earlier. That prickle of feminist outrage isn’t an incidental detail (you could almost read it as a Hillary allegory, though Viserys is more Tim Kaine than Trump). After his wife dies in childbirth, Viserys makes the fateful decision to disavow his unpredictable and hot-headed younger brother Daemon (Matt Smith) in favor of anointing his teenage daughter Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) as his heir… a decision he stubbornly stands behind, even after he marries Rhaenyra’s childhood best friend Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey), who bears him multiple sons. You don’t need a Westerosi compass to see where this is going. House of the Dragon amounts to - what else - another game of thrones, and it’s a little frustrating that it takes an entire season to reach what feels like the story’s actual starting point. The writers execute not one, but two major time jumps (Alcock and Carey bow out after five episodes, with Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke taking over as their adult versions), and the effect is undeniably jarring. Alcock, mostly limited to Australian television up to this point, is a real find; the show is worse off without her willfully luminous spark. But then she’s one of the few cast members who feels properly maximized - Cooke, for example, is a talented actress who’s forced to play almost every scene as if she’s gotten a whiff of curdled milk. As her father Otto, the King’s Machiavellian Hand (is there any other kind?), the dynamic Rhys Ifans has rarely seemed this penned in (Daemon, meanwhile, is a pretty standard George R.R. Martin creation, but the role at least affords Smith the opportunity to indulge in charismatic cruelty). So sour was the taste left by the Game of Thrones finale, that many went so far as to dismiss the entire series as a sunk cost. This, of course, was foolishness, and there were many invaluable lessons from that show that House of the Dragon would have been wise to recognize. Martin’s novels offered a simple moral dichotomy - Starks = good / Lannisters = bad - that allowed readers an easy-to-grasp point of entry into a fantasy world whose central conflicts would slowly turn grayer and more complex - an approach adopted by creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss. But the prequel’s emotional stakes are much harder to pin down. The fact that the entire conflict effectively teeters on the fragile childhood bond that still lingers between Rhaenyra and Alicent is rich with potential… and will hopefully blossom next season (whenever that is). But as things stand, there isn’t much impetus to choose sides - one might favor Team Rhaenyra by default, simply because her kids prove slightly less obnoxious than Alicent’s brood. House of the Dragon does rival its predecessor in terms of production value… and any sequence involving dragons in flight packs an undeniable charge (the promise of dragon-on-dragon battles is also one area in which the series has a clear leg up on what Game of Thrones already offered). But it’s hard to believe the show navigated the entire development process without someone pointing out how desperately it could use a character with a touch of wit - a Tyrion or, at the very least, a Littlefinger to cut against the grim grain of these humorless Targaryen dispositions. These characters are, frankly, a collective drag much of the time. It almost makes one inclined to wander up North, and see what the Starks are up to.
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11/7/2022 0 Comments Bad sisters (season 1) There’s no reason to be coy or to beat around the bush here - Bad Sisters is one of the very best shows on TV at the moment. Inspired by the Flemish series Clan, this blackly comic Apple TV+ offering is the latest from immensely talented writer/star Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe), and, if there’s any shred of common sense, this should cement her place as one of the medium’s leading creative voices.
Set in Dublin, the show revolves around the five close-knit Garvey sisters - specifically the gentle-tempered Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), who has the misfortune of being married to the almost unfathomably loathsome John Paul (Claes Bang)… a prick of such astonishing magnitude that Grace’s sisters - Eva (Horgan), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene), and Becka (Eve Hewson) - finally decide they have no recourse but to plot his demise. In a rather brilliant structural move, half of the series takes place in the aftermath of John Paul’s funeral, as half-brothers and mismatched insurance investigators Thomas (Brian Gleeson) and Matt (Daryl McCormack) show up, desperately looking for any excuse to prevent Grace from collecting on her husband’s life insurance policy (a situation made that much more complicated by Matt and Becka becoming romantically entangled before either realizes who the other is)… while the other half unfolds in flashbacks, following the Garvey sisters as they try in vain to plan the perfect murder (if the early episodes have an overly farcical whiff about them (it’s hard not to be five steps ahead of a liver poisoning plot that goes awry), it’s worth persisting; the narrative threads braid together slowly, delicately… almost imperceptibly). While it seems impossible to believe that John Paul doesn’t inevitably come off as the most cartoonish of caricatures, such is the laser-attuned specificity of the writing (and the impressive discipline of Bang’s performance), that this is never the case (the fiendishness with which he manipulates, gaslights and generally ill-treats Grace in particular frequently causes you to suck the air in through your teeth). But the show in general doesn’t traffic in simplistic moral binaries. Thomas seemingly begins the series as a garden variety weasel whose utter cheek in insinuating himself in the lives of the grieving Grace and her sisters is appalling, even to Matt… but as his motivations for wanting to see the claim rejected come into focus, he becomes possibly the show’s most painfully relatable character. Likewise, the married Ursula’s primary impulse for wanting John Paul dead is his threat to expose her ongoing affair with a scruffy photographer; his behavior may be smugly repulsive, even violative, but she hardly ranks as the sympathetic party in the equation (which isn’t meant as a condemnation either - she’s just flawed and messy, as, you know… people tend to be). The entire cast is excellent, and it’s no surprise that Horgan is the dependable conductor who ensures the trains run on time, so to speak. But three in particular are worthy of mention. Sarah Greene, as the one-eyed Bibi (and so tremendous does she look with an eye-patch, it’s difficult to go back to her non-eye-patched acting), is the most venomously aggressive about seeing the plan through, delivering each and every line with a barb of vinegary disdain… but also soars to tragicomic heights, particularly in the pitch-perfect payoff to the paintball episode; Eve Hewson, as the flighty but almost criminally adorable Becka (the sort of Irish girl one aspires to meet, but doesn’t quite believe really exists), is heartbreaking for so many reasons; and Daryl McCormack, who flexes major star potential as Matt, plays a thoroughly decent figure who finds his loyalties painfully pulled in multiple directions as he’s abruptly positioned as the denouement’s unlikely catalyst. More than anything though, Bad Sisters is frequently and morbidly hilarious. Looking to minimize any chance of collateral damage, the sisters plot to spike John Paul’s nose spray with Rohypnol… only for the situation to spiral completely and riotously out of control (a cat’s unfortunate fate strikes a sour note, but - objectively - the fallout marvelously underscores, once again, what a monumental turd John Paul is). As the series soldiers towards the brink of its climactic revelations - effectively scored to God’s Gonna Cut You Down - it’s not terribly difficult to figure out where things are headed (and as the final pieces fall into place, a few of the plot seams do admittedly start to show), but the conclusion is both appropriate and satisfying. Bad Sisters is a self-contained and fully-realized season of television, but some sort of follow-up - in which the Garvey sisters find themselves enmeshed in a fresh pickle of some sort - would be more than welcome. These characters are far, far too good to bid farewell to already. |
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