Mike Hale

So of course there’s a new “Hanna,” a series created for Amazon Prime Video by one of the film’s screenwriters (David Farr) with the film’s director (Joe Wright) as a consultant. It tells a story similar in outline to the one in the movie: Hanna, a genetically altered teenage girl raised in the forest and trained for battle by the gruff father figure Erik, goes out into the world to confront Marissa, the wicked witch-CIA agent-evil stepmother who created her. Except now it’s close to eight hours long instead of two.

Like its heroine, the series is an exercise in modification — how to quadruple a story’s length as well as leave it open-ended. And as with Hanna herself, the results are mixed: mostly sad, with a glimmer of hope at the end.

One of Farr’s primary strategies (he wrote seven of the series’ eight episodes) is to jettison the original’s most distinctive feature. The film told a fairly conventional action story in the style of a fairy tale, with explicit references to the Brothers Grimm to drive the point home, and Wright had the technique and sensibility to make it work. The characters functioned as both action-movie conventions and mythical heroes and monsters. The story moved through fantastic (but real) landscapes by a fairy-tale logic, and the viewer shared Hanna’s wonder at the beauty and corruption of the world she’d been sequestered from.

In the series, the Grimms are gone, and Hanna (played by young British actress Esme Creed-Miles) is less magical heroine and more angtsy teenage supersoldier — la femme Nikita without the clingy dresses. The heroes are less heroic and the baddies less monstrous, and their back stories are expanded in ways that make them more “complex” but no more interesting. The mysteries of Hanna’s past are explored in much greater detail, while the sense of mystery never quite takes hold.

The literalization of the story for streaming-series purposes is encapsulated in the new opening, a long, expository chase scene that was a brief flashback in the film. Another crucial change in the first episode, discreetly slipped into the dialogue, recasts the entire plot, changing the motive for Hanna’s mission from revenge to survival — a switch that lowers the intensity but opens the door for complications, digressions and future seasons.

A more prosaic “Hanna” could certainly succeed on its own terms in the crowded field of action-oriented conspiracy thriller. The bigger problem, though, is that most of what Farr has added to pad out the story is drab filler: marital strife in the normal family that shelters Hanna, Marissa’s problems with work-life balance, boyfriend tensions between Hanna and her pal Sophie. (Rhianne Barreto, as the angry Sophie, gives the show’s most energetic and engaging performance.) The series is filled with all the things that Wright, in the film, proved the story could do without.

Beating “Hanna” the series with the stick of “Hanna” the film would be less fair if the series didn’t, through about six episodes, hew so closely to the framework of the movie. And you can’t really address the subject without noting the perfect casting in the original of Saoirse Ronan as Hanna, with her ability to be both ethereal and feral, dreamlike and convincingly physical. Creed-Miles, by comparison, is, well, a good soldier. Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman, as Marissa and Erik, work hard in roles that have been glummed down from what Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana played in the original.

If you stick with Amazon’s “Hanna,” its energy and interest (if not originality) tick up in the last couple episodes, when the story definitively moves beyond that of the movie and capitalizes on a couple of plot possibilities that the film closed off or glossed over. Yasmin Monet Prince, a striking British actress with a very short list of screen credits, turns up as a character you wish had been around for the previous six hours. Suddenly it feels like you’re in a fairy tale again.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/arts/television/hanna-review.html" id="431ee0d3-36b1-396b-a313-b9ef886cd048">The New York Times</a>.

“Hanna,” released in 2011, was not a film that called out for a remake or a sequel. It had a singular style, and a delicacy — despite its frequent beatdowns and gunbattles — that would suffer from duplication. Bookended by parallel killings, it was a self-contained chronicle of an obsessive and successful quest for revenge that left no important questions unanswered.

Review: Amazon's 'Hanna,' Genetically Modified for Streaming Video

OK, I don’t actually know what drives Elba, who created (with Gary Reich) and stars in “Turn Up Charlie.” But despite his action hero persona and style-icon status, there is evidence that his heart isn’t entirely in playing unnerving gangsters (Stringer Bell, “The Wire”), heroic cops (John Luther, “Luther”) and Asgardian sentries (Heimdall, Marvel Cinematic Universe).

He’s been a working musician for as long as he’s been an actor, and finds the time to maintain a second career as a DJ, producer, rapper and singer; he’s scheduled to perform at Coachella next month. That’s no hobby.

And then he squeezes in a third career as the Norman Lear (or the Mike Leigh, more aptly) of London’s West African immigrant community. He created and wrote the 2018 series “In the Long Run,” a kitchen-sink comedy about a family that shared his Sierra Leonean roots, before making “Turn Up Charlie,” in which he plays the title character, an old-school DJ who’s 20 years past his lone hit and too ashamed to tell his parents back in Nigeria that he’s a failure.

The new series takes an early turn away from naturalism, though. David (J.J. Feild), a childhood friend of Charlie’s who’s become a Hollywood star, returns to London with his wife, Sara (Piper Perabo), a famous DJ, so that their 11-year-old daughter, Gabrielle (Frankie Hervey), can settle down and get the kind of British schooling her father too fondly remembers.

David and Sara’s commitment to full-time parenting is only calf-leather deep, however, which leads to the show’s echt-sitcom contrivance: They recruit the barely employed Charlie as nanny for their holy terror of a daughter. So: “Who’s the Boss” with a washed-up British DJ instead of a washed-up U.S. baseball player.

And there’s a fair measure of the kind of embarrassing sitcommery this premise would lead you to expect. If you can live without seeing Idris Elba saying “I’m adorbs” to an 11-year-old girl, you can live without “Turn Up Charlie.” In addition to being regularly humiliated by the wiseacre child he has to chase around London and Ibiza, Charlie also has to endure the put-downs of his saucy auntie, Lydia (Jocelyn Jee Esien), who dispenses wisdom about romance to him and parenting to his white friends.

Elba is admirably committed to the drab, sentimental material (written by Georgia Lester, Victoria Asare-Archer, Laura Neal and Femi Oyeniran), and his portrayal is unfailingly gracious and warm. He’s a gung-ho, grizzled straight man, readily playing against his superheroic image. (Although Charlie is still fought over by the ladies, and there are some oddly graphic discussions of the size of his cartridge.)

One problem, though: He’s just not funny. Elba’s considerable skills in projecting menace and resolve don’t come into play, and he mostly just looks genial and a little lost. With the exception of a few supporting players, like Esien and Guz Khan as Charlie’s stoner buddy, that’s a problem up and down the call sheet — reasonably talented performers with no aptitude for comedy.

The casting issue is mitigated, to some extent, by the show’s proclivity for mixing lachrymose family drama in with the odd-couple farce. Parents, daughter and nanny all feel neglected and jealous in different degrees and directions, a potentially barbed situation that the writers play for mild laughs and greeting-card parables. A couple of episodes set on Ibiza make the supposedly debauched party scene look like a weekend fair at a progressive high school.

It’s commendable that an actor whose itinerary includes the next “Suicide Squad” film and George Miller’s super-buzzy “Three Thousand Years of Longing” puts his weight behind more plebeian projects like “Turn Up Charlie.” That said, if you’d be interested in an actually funny comedy that incorporates turntablism and London immigrants, the five seasons of “People Just Do Nothing” are available on Netflix.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/arts/television/turn-up-charlie-review-idris-elba-netflix.html" id="0a18fe2c-a228-34a3-aef9-e8a47a36ee7a">The New York Times</a>.

The new Netflix series “Turn Up Charlie” gets to the heart of Idris Elba, sitting at the intersection of his two passions: being a DJ and making heartwarming dramedies that reflect his working-class London origins.

In 'Turn Up Charlie,' the Manny Isn't Just a Man, He's Idris Elba

“The Boys” is not pitched at the feverish level of “Preacher,” in terms of either mayhem or dark comic style — its showrunner, Eric Kripke, is the maker of network series like “Supernatural” and “Timeless,” and the eight-episode “Boys” is like a high-end, more thoughtfully assembled, slightly bloodier and sexier version of one of those conventional shows. (“Preacher” is overseen by Sam Catlin, whose previous writing and producing experience includes “Breaking Bad.”)

“The Boys” is also a little more of a known quantity because it’s a superhero show. That it’s an anti-superhero show — in which the costumed crime fighters are the bad guys, arrogant and corporatized and heedless of collateral damage to innocent humans, and the Boys of the title are a motley, disreputable bunch who take them on — doesn’t change the basic equation. The visual takeaway is still people in tights who can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes, the wrinkle being that we’re rooting for the guy fighting back with his wits and a crowbar.

All of that said, the series is quite enjoyable, particularly in a fast and clever first episode (written by Kripke and directed by Dan Trachtenberg) that introduces us to the show’s world — marginally exaggerated from our own — and gives the show’s real hero, the distinctly non-superpowered electronics salesman Hughie (Jack Quaid), a reason to hate the supes. In a judiciously horrifying scene, we witness the accidental obliteration of Hughie’s fiancee by an out-of-control Flash-like character, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), who’s a member of the Seven, America’s premiere superhero team.

Branded and managed by Vought, an evil corporation occupying a futuristic tower not far from the Empire State Building, the Seven are led by a patriotic blond Übermensch, Homelander (played with a potently quiet creepiness by Antony Starr of “Banshee”). He is Superman gone sour, and the show merrily frames the Seven as exemplars of American privilege, patriarchy and fraudulent celebrity culture. Homelander’s wholesome facade hides a serial liar and stalker, while aquatic hero the Deep (Chace Crawford) is a walking #MeToo nightmare. Vought covers up their excesses while selling their services to crime-ridden cities and lobbying to have them made responsible for national defense.

Hughie, a former fan boy now enraged and suffering from post-superhero stress, is recruited in a clandestine attempt to bring down the Seven by a bruiser named Billy Butcher (an amusing Karl Urban), who has his own reasons to want them stopped or dead. More allies gradually join their vendetta, and the show loses some of its spark over subsequent episodes in part because of the unwieldy cast that needs to be introduced and kept busy — the Seven (including Erin Moriarty as the new member, an innocent from Des Moines, Iowa), plus five Boys, plus Elisabeth Shue as a Vought executive, Simon Pegg as Hughie’s dad and Jennifer Esposito as a CIA agent who has a past with Butcher. It’s a lot of bodies to pack into eight episodes.

Quaid, who took an arrow as Marvel in “The Hunger Games” (and is the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid), gives a charming, sympathetic performance as the overwhelmed but resilient Hughie, and you’re glad when he’s on screen. And overall, the architecture of Ennis’ story — a lighter, less apocalyptic take on the kind of superhero deconstruction Alan Moore did in “Miracleman” and “Watchmen” — is interesting enough, and executed with enough panache, to pull you along. Putting the onus on Hughie to choose a true, human-scaled heroism isn’t a new idea, but it still has an emotional tug.

And the notion that the world needs to be saved from its superheros has another sneaky resonance: Vought, with its stable of 200 costumed heroes, its theme parks and film franchises (and a management Butcher calls “empty suits with Cornell degrees”), resembles nothing so much as the comics leviathans Marvel and DC. (The “Boys” comic book was first published, and then dropped, by a DC imprint.) When Hughie learns the truth about the Seven, he’s outgrowing the comic books of his youth — the kind of heroes DC and Marvel sell. “The Boys,” meanwhile, is offering the kind of smart, easygoing pleasure that most of the Marvel Netflix shows, its closest analogues, didn’t quite reach.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/television/review-the-boys-amazon-prime.html" id="711ae4cb-994c-395a-aa82-2e5d5a6f0430">The New York Times</a>.

The team of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (producers) and Garth Ennis (comics writer) has given us AMC’s “Preacher,” the most inventive, audacious and purely entertaining comics-based series of the past few years. With “Preacher” on the way out — its final season begins Aug. 4 — the three are getting right back in the game, with a new show based on an Ennis comic, “The Boys,” coming to Amazon Prime Video on Friday.

Review: 'The Boys' Deconstructs the Superhero, With a Light Touch

The writers, producers and performers Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin like to cover their comedic bets. On Wednesday, Comedy Central is premiering “South Side,” their amiable new sitcom set in the working-class Chicago neighborhood of Englewood. But wait, there’s more: The following Wednesday, IFC is premiering “Sherman’s Showcase,” their high-concept vaudeville act that takes the form of a tribute to a fictional variety show at the intersection of “Soul Train,” “Laugh-In” and late-night cable-access.

While the two shows look nothing like each other, there are some constants in the Riddle-and-Salahuddin approach. Their humor, while clever and with a satirical edge, is embracing and to a large degree universal — they’re more interested in pointing out foibles than in retailing grievances (particularly in “South Side”).

Complementing that stance is a worldview that feels thoroughly nostalgic. “South Side,” about a pair of best friends and recent community-college graduates with aspirations — the 10-episode season largely charts their efforts to find more gainful employment than their jobs as furniture repossessors — is set in the present day of mint lattes and bitcoin. But its rhythms and relationships are thoroughly traditional, carrying on a sitcom legacy running from “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times” through Aaron McGruder’s “Black Jesus” to “Rel,” the Lil Rel Howery series also set on Chicago’s South Side. (Howery has a supporting role in “South Side” as a fellow furniture-store employee and abrasive antagonist to the easygoing heroes.)

“Sherman’s Showcase,” meanwhile, is a pure jolt of stylized nostalgia, from its affectionate sendups of soul, R&amp;B; and hip-hop to its candy-colored sets with their abstract cutouts, traversed by roller-skating dancers. “American culture peaked in 1973,” proclaims the host of the show within the show, Sherman McDaniel (Salahuddin). “Anything after that is a [expletive] lie.”

The deeper tie between the two shows, though, may be Riddle and Salahuddin’s sketch-comedy sensibility. College friends and writing partners, they worked together for three years on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” That experience directly informs “Sherman’s Showcase,” but it can also be seen in “South Side,” whose scenes and episodes don’t build (at least not in any intricate or surprising way) but skip along from joke to joke, verbally and visually.

Luckily, the jokes come along quickly and are mostly pretty good. And they’re held together by a consistent theme: While the central characters Simon and Kareem (Sultan Salahuddin, Bashir’s brother, and Kareme Young) and the other residents of Englewood constantly look for ways to make some extra cash, they are in turn victimized by more powerful economic forces, in a round robin of low-level exploitation.

Simon and Kareem may be taken advantage of in a series of dicey and comically unlikely ventures, from dealing black-market Viagra to cryptocurrency speculation. But their day jobs are with the rapacious Rent-T-Own, managed by Kareem’s brother, Q (played by Kareme Young’s twin, Quincy), and they’re not overly sentimental about taking back the television sets and Xboxes that their neighbors are being overcharged for. It’s left to the local gangster, Shaw (LaRoyce Hawkins), to point out that they’re part of the problem: “When you was a little homey, did you always dream of harassing black people for their appliances?”

Sultan Salahuddin, a comedian who’s performed with the Upright Citizens Brigade, and Kareme Young are not seasoned actors, and their work in “South Side” is serviceable. But the scripts don’t demand much beyond fully inhabiting their hopeful, scrambling characters. Salahuddin has a nice touch with melancholic moments, like a scene in which Simon is fired from his dream job (clerk at a cable-television provider) after four hours and instead of getting angry, shrugs his shoulders and takes his children to a space-travel exhibit.

And the show finds consistently funny ways to subvert the clichés of the poor-urban-neighborhood narrative, in both its earnest and menacing incarnations. When the opportunistic cop played by Chandra Russell (Bashir Salahuddin’s wife) buys a brownstone on the cheap, she finds herself saddled with a deadbeat tenant who was a Chicago civil-rights heroine and trades on her status to skip the rent. “I am all paid up,” she declares, adding that her new landlord is “a little legal-pad-colored heifer.”

Where “South Side” feels like a family production, “Sherman’s Showcase” is starrier, with a brightness and energy to match. It boasts John Legend, playing himself as the host of the mock retrospective (it’s an expansion of the Helen Mirren role from “Documentary Now,” a clear influence on the series), and cameos by a lineup of good-sport guest stars including Ray Parker Jr., Quincy Jones and several Wayans brothers.

The format, stretched across eight episodes, allows Riddle and Salahuddin to throw a lot of things against the wall, and they don’t all stick. Tiffany Haddish eating soup, presented as an example of a failed idea, is a failed idea, though a harmlessly brief one. And the metafictional elements, as the history of the fake show is traced across four decades toward a politically topical finale, can get tiresome. It may not hold your interest, but those with stamina can hang around for the bits that work, like a promo for Sherman’s CD compilation “Now That’s What I Call White Music,” or an advertisement in which two winsome children play a hip-hop version of Clue: “The haters. In the conservatory. With the Draco!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/arts/television/south-side-shermans-showcase-review.html" id="538c0640-0ec0-3997-a4fe-c40530c3954c">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

'South Side' and 'Sherman's Showcase': Two Flavors of Nostalgia

“Veronica Mars,” which ran for three seasons on UPN and CW from 2004 to 2007, has become the zombie of entertainment franchises: revived using Kickstarter for a 2014 feature film, and now revived again for an eight-episode fourth season on Hulu.

Season 4 was shock-released Friday, a week ahead of schedule, and like the film (also called “Veronica Mars”), it reunites the central cast, which has stuck with the story across 15 years. Kristen Bell is Veronica, the cynical daddy’s girl and tough California beach-town private eye, a cocktail of Nancy Drew and Sam Spade. Enrico Colantoni is Keith Mars, her wry father and mentor, banged up and fearing dementia after the brutal conclusion of the film. And Jason Dohring is back as Logan Echolls, her bad-boy boyfriend, now a naval intelligence officer whose absences on secret missions supply the relationship angst formerly fueled by teenage moodiness and violence.

These three and a number of regular supporting players, including the friends portrayed by Percy Daggs III, Francis Capra and Ryan Hansen, solve a mystery — who’s setting off bombs targeting spring breakers in the seedier sections of Neptune, the home base of Mars Investigations — while enacting the show’s familiar, and still entertaining, lightly comic spin on hard-boiled noir.

We’re not in high school anymore, though, and as Veronica agonizes over her future with Logan, frets about Keith’s health and bemoans the continuing gentrification of Neptune, her nostalgia for a simpler time may be paralleled by the viewer’s nostalgia for the immediate pleasures of the show’s splendid first season. Do we need more “Veronica Mars,” even if it continues to arrive in polished and pleasing packages?

Opening during Veronica’s junior year at Neptune High, the series originally stood out for its clever and literate writing and the superior performances of Bell, Colantoni and Dohring. (Rob Thomas, the show’s creator, still oversees it and wrote the new season’s first and last episodes.) It was perhaps even more unusual for the way it presented a teenage world, and a story hinging on teenage melodrama, from a wised-up, adult point of view and with a fully adult emotional sensibility.

The adult intelligence is still there, and Bell and Colantoni are still wonderful together, consistently nailing the old-Hollywood, tough-and-tender style the show demands and demonstrating seemingly effortless comic grace. But Thomas hasn’t found a really satisfactory replacement for the show’s loss of teen spirit; and the grown-up romantic travails of Veronica and Logan, a significant subplot in the new season, aren’t as compelling as their tempestuous high school amours.

It’s also a problem that the streaming-season model entails stretching a single mystery over close to eight hours. That’s new for “Veronica Mars” — the network seasons had long-arc mysteries, but they were broken up by lighter stand-alone cases over their 22 episodes. Thomas has put together a complicated caper in Season 4, with the bombings simultaneously investigated by Veronica and Keith, the hapless Neptune police, a group of true-crime nerds, a pair of Mexican cartel hit men and Matty, a young woman who evolves into Veronica’s protégée. (Played by Izabela Vidovic, Matty fills the vacuum left by Tina Majorino’s pugnacious Mac, the one central character who doesn’t return.) Some of the twists are clever, but in the eight-episode format the story’s implausibilities are more distracting. The seams show in a way that didn’t used to matter.

(There’s another more directly annoying consequence of the move to streaming: several obtrusive product placements for Hulu itself, including a scene in which Veronica and Logan settle in to binge the last show you can imagine them watching, the British costume drama “Harlots.”)

Still, whenever the love story starts to drag or the mystery gets irritatingly convoluted, and despite an abrupt (and seemingly convenient) late detour into tragedy, “Veronica Mars” finds ways to charm you. Bell’s sparkle — no one does pluckiness better, or funnier — and Colantoni’s utterly relaxed, jazzlike timing are givens. Old favorites like Daran Norris, Duane Daniels and especially Max Greenfield make their usual solid comic contributions. (The chemistry between Bell and Greenfield puts a spotlight on the show’s failure to grow Dohring’s character into an interesting adult.) The show has fun with its own history, as in a touching scene when Daggs’ Wallace, now a teacher, watches Matty extract information from a love-struck mark just like Veronica used to when he was her high-school accomplice.

The season also benefits from the addition of a pair of performers whose contrasting styles speak to the show’s blend of genres: Patton Oswalt, bringing his nervous screwball energy to the role of a pizza deliveryman and amateur sleuth, and J.K. Simmons, supplying noirish menace and cool as an aging ex-con and fixer who sees a soul mate in Keith. (Simmons and Colantoni’s scenes together constitute the season’s most satisfying romance.) Whether we needed another installment of “Veronica Mars” or not, there are more than enough reasons not to miss it now that it’s here.

Event Information:

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/arts/television/veronica-mars-review.html" id="6210681f-5860-3317-a5bc-63833f65da96">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

'Veronica Mars' and the One-Great-Season Debate

(There’s another more directly annoying consequence of the move to streaming: several obtrusive product placements for Hulu itself, including a scene in which Veronica and Keith settle in to binge the last show you can imagine them watching, the British costume drama “Harlots.”)

Jed Mercurio knows a thing or two about what television viewers in Britain like. His series “Bodyguard” was the highest rated show there (outside of the World Cup) in 2018. And now the fifth season of his “Line of Duty” is the highest rated British drama of 2019 so far.

In the case of “Line of Duty,” whose newest six-episode season comes to Acorn TV on Monday (joining the previous four), millions of viewers apparently like a cocktail of four parts forensics to one part action, with a twist of sensationalism and a splash of melodrama. It’s not good for you, but it will definitely give you a buzz.

In Season 5, the focus remains on three detectives in an anti-corruption unit (the British equivalent of internal affairs) in a grimy, unnamed city that resembles Birmingham. (The resemblance was strongest in Season 1, when the show was filmed there; subsequent seasons have been shot in Belfast, in Northern Ireland.)

Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) is walking again after being thrown down a flight of stairs in Season 4, and more than a little resentful that his partner, Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), got the promotion to inspector that was supposed to be his. (Given the show’s minimalist approach to humor, it’s very funny when he has to call her “Ma’am.”) Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) — their gaffer, or boss — is in a general state of decline, living in a hotel and dealing with a level of debt that’s particularly unhealthy for someone whose job is to ferret out cops on the take.

These three tackle a new case, and a new dirty cop, each season, but a distinguishing feature of “Line of Duty” is that all the cases run together in a single, continuing story. Someone in the top ranks of the police is in cahoots with organized crime, but he or she is always just out of reach, pulling the strings of the people Steve, Kate and Ted bring down. In the sort of cloak-and-dagger detail Mercurio favors, the mastermind is known only as H, a bit like the unseen Number One in “The Prisoner.”

With a sixth season ordered by the BBC, it’s not really a spoiler to say that the search will continue. In the meantime, this season’s antagonist is a rogue undercover cop — to say who plays him or her would be a giveaway — who acts as a kind of doppelgänger for our heroes, employing the tactics that they might wish to.

A primary strength of the series, beyond Mercurio’s ability to precisely blend his cop-show formulas, has been its gallery of charismatic, conflicted “bent” cops, played by an exceptionally able roster of actors: Lennie Harris, Keeley Hawes, Thandie Newton. If the new season falls slightly short of the show’s usual standard, it’s because neither this character nor the performance in the role is as interesting as its predecessors.

Otherwise, all the elements are in place. The show still centers on its signature interrogations, the equivalent of an action show’s fight scenes — long and static but intricately choreographed, fought through precise exchanges of haikulike jargon. (Regular viewers understand U.C.O., O.C.G. and D.I.R., and know that an officer can insist on being questioned by someone of superior rank.)

And once or twice an episode, the satisfyingly nerdy police-procedural grind will be punctuated by breakneck rushing about (“We’ll have to blue-light it!”) followed by some improbably violent or lurid action. That these situations are generally less baroque than in past seasons — fairly straightforward hijackings and shootouts, with no one being thrown from a hospital window or waking up to an amputated hand — will be either an improvement or disappointment depending on your taste.

“Line of Duty” works through a careful balancing act — Mercurio can overplay the tension, and get away with a high degree of ambient implausibility (how many times can Kate go undercover in one medium-sized city?), as long as he underplays the longer sequences of investigation and the dips into the cops’ private lives. It’s similar to Dick Wolf’s “Law &amp; Order” formula, and it makes “Line of Duty” a better show than the more highly rated “Bodyguard,” where Mercurio leaned heavily into melodrama.

The key underplayer is Compston as the combative Steve, the show’s moral center between the more pragmatic Kate and the more blustery, self-righteous Ted. Responding to station-house shootouts and sinister conspiracies with a raised eyebrow and a tight frown, he’s the beacon of sanity who allows us to enjoy the craziness guilt-free.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/arts/television/review-line-of-duty.html" id="7f20d07d-ee2c-3941-a15c-514c003afa65">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Good Cop, Bad Cop, Crazy Cop in 'Line of Duty'

“Chernobyl,” a five-part miniseries starting Monday on HBO (in coproduction with British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism.

Of course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie.

Mazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks.

From there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3.

Mazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the show trial of the plant’s supervisors as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama.

Looking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion.

Legasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a backroom by the KGB.

The transformation of Legasov into a daring whistleblower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life.

The biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat and supervised its evacuation?)

In the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes.

At a time when the documentary miniseries is probably the strongest, most interesting area of television, it’s too bad that Alex Gibney or Amy Berg didn’t get to Chernobyl first.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/review-chernobyl-hbo.html" id="735a8f79-012a-3c20-a36a-6b614177ad5a">The New York Times</a>.

How do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing.

Review: 'Chernobyl,' the Disaster Movie

Liz Feldman, who created the show, has been writing and performing comedy for more than half of her 41 years, and she’s demonstrated some real flexibility. She was a writer for Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show and for “Blue Collar TV,” which starred red-state favorites like Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. She wrote for conventional sitcoms like “2 Broke Girls” and “Hot in Cleveland” while hosting her own “gay-mazing” YouTube series, “This Just Out,” from her kitchen table.

Nothing she had done before, though, resembled the kind of up-to-the-minute streaming dramedy that “Dead to Me” wants to be. And while its 10 half-hour episodes have a lot of the requisite look and feel — the enervated, dolorous mood and rhythms; the mysteries within mysteries; the handsomely filmed Southern California locations — the show harks back to Feldman’s roots. At heart it’s a traditional odd-couple sitcom, albeit one that’s heavy on situation and light on comedy.

Applegate plays Jen, whose husband was killed by a hit-and-run driver, and Cardellini plays Judy, whose fiancé died of a heart attack. Jen is angry and cynical and hard-edged, Judy is rueful and apologetic and twee, and we know where that’s going. Jen will toughen up Judy and Judy will soften up Jen, an exchange of services made easier by the unlikely twist of Judy’s moving into Jen’s guesthouse.

Hundreds of episodes have been built around less. Short-season streaming shows don’t work that way, though, so Feldman counterpoints the comedy of female friendship with the tragedy of male condescension and predation, and sets it all within the framework of a murder mystery, or at least a manslaughter mystery.

As she makes the rounds of Orange County’s beach towns selling real estate, Jen searches for the car that mowed down her husband. Judy, meanwhile, has big secrets, which are doled out in flashbacks throughout the season. The revelations about her past are both mildly surprising and, in the way they stretch out the plot and inject conflict into her and Jen’s relationship, entirely predictable.

There’s some ingenuity in the ways Feldman works out the story’s complications. There’s craftsmanship in the details, like a running motif of Judy’s continually building up to confessions that turn out not to be the confession we’re anticipating. And there are moments when the comic situations click, mostly involving supporting characters like the earnest pastor and grief counselor played by Keong Sim or the casserole-bearing neighbor played by Suzy Nakamura.

But at the heart of the story, things don’t really add up or carry the emotional weight they should, because Judy and Jen are ideas more than characters — avatars of anger, grief and guilt. We’re told that their unexpected bond is based on giving each other the space to grieve in their own ways, but it often feels like they’re just indulging each other’s bad choices in ways that don’t make narrative sense.

Applegate, whose TV-comedy roots stretch back more than 30 years, most notably on “Married With Children,” gives a strained, uptight performance that superficially matches up with Jen’s personality but isn’t all that fun to watch. You don’t mind when she’s onscreen with Cardellini, though. Starring in a live-action comedy series for the first time since “Freaks and Geeks,” Cardellini gives Judy a vibrancy and a genuine peculiarity — she’s the show’s one consistent source of pleasure.

Otherwise the show always seems to be reaching for something — a complexity, an ambiguity — that it doesn’t support and doesn’t really need. It may be telling that one of the ways Jen and Judy bond is through a shared love of the 1980s chestnut “The Facts of Life.” If that’s Feldman’s way of signaling her own nostalgia for the moral certainties of an earlier sitcom era, it’s also an admission that there’s no going back.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/arts/television/dead-to-me-netflix-review.html" id="01ea4ab9-1f2f-3a64-ae5c-7e45218b1b70">The New York Times</a>.

This week’s case study in the anxieties of contemporary television: “Dead to Me,” a new series on Netflix starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as widows who meet cute at a grief support group.

Review: In 'Dead to Me' on Netflix, Widows Make the Best BFFs

With a dozen or so high-profile television series debuting over the next week — the usual number these days — you could reasonably ask why the fifth season of an old-fashioned cop show deserves attention. Isn’t there a woke comedy or an oddball Netflix import we could be talking about?

Of course there is, or are — Friday brings “Ramy” on Hulu and “Lunatics” on Netflix. But for some of us, the big news that day is the return of “Bosch,” the enduring Amazon series based on Michael Connelly’s novels about Harry Bosch, a Los Angeles police detective played with infinite layers of moody recalcitrance by Titus Welliver.

Developed for TV by Eric Overmyer (“Treme”) and now overseen by Daniel Pyne, “Bosch” gets a little more veneration than it deserves in certain quarters, where hard-boiled nostalgia rules. The new season still pauses for the occasional on-the-nose sermon about the natures of truth and justice. And the large cast is, overall, more efficient than virtuosic, compared to those of other streaming and cable series.

But efficiency is the point: In its determined lack of adornment, its commitment to the straight and narrow — reflecting the personality of its hero — “Bosch” is an increasingly rare commodity in a time when genre dramas will resort to any kind of high-concept trickery to stand out. It doesn’t withhold information to create false tension, or play games with point of view, or arbitrarily ratchet the pace up and down. It just puts one foot in front of the other and trusts its audience to follow along.

Season 5 begins with a slight bit of narrative complication: a short flash-forward in which an undercover Bosch infiltrates the desert camp of a crew of opioid dealers. Then it’s back to the quotidian business of police life, with four or five plot threads that will dovetail over 10 episodes (five were available for review). A murder in a small-time pharmacy puts Bosch onto the pill ring; a review board looks into one of his old cases; his partner, Jerry (Jamie Hector), has trouble with an informant; his boss, Grace (Amy Aquino), has to broker the uncertain futures of the veteran detectives known as Crate and Barrel.

Bosch’s daughter, Maddie, is now an intern in the district attorney’s office, and she’s the first one to know that his past conduct is once again under investigation. The best thing about the new season is the expansion of Madison Lintz’s role as the quietly bullheaded Maddie, no longer just a victim of Bosch’s failed marriage or a target of criminals looking to put pressure on him.

Lintz and Welliver have always been great together, and you can see that they, and the writers, are having a blast now that Maddie and her father get to relate to each other as adults. The story puts Maddie in a tough spot: She’s reflexively loyal to her dad, and bends the rules to get him information, but she’s also troubled by accusations that he tampered with evidence.

“Bosch” doesn’t hype up the conflict and potential sentimentality, though (as the Fox series “The Rookie” does with a similar story line this season). The characters stay true to the temperaments they’ve been given — reserved and private but completely frank with one another when called for. Amid the murders and station house politics, what stands out is Bosch’s matter-of-fact acceptance of, and pride in, his daughter’s intelligence and maturity.

The season’s structure — with the present-tense action constituting a season-long flashback — has its plusses and minuses. As Bosch trains for the undercover mission that we’ve already seen going haywire, there’s some clever foreshadowing: We get a forecast of how he’ll get himself out of that future pickle. (There’s no doubt that he will get out of it. The show has already been renewed for a sixth season.)

There’s less mystery than usual in that central story, though. The writers try to compensate by making the subplots more expansive and complicated, which just means that none of the story lines feel quite as deep and textured as we’re used to. But with Bosch, it’s all about the gut feeling, and the same is true of “Bosch.” It may cut a corner here and there, but you can trust it to do the right thing in the end.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/arts/television/bosch-season-5-review.html" id="09ad4a98-e0b2-3c14-aee2-e375673eaa6c">The New York Times</a>.

'Bosch' Is Back, Still on the Straight and Narrow

How’s this for a state of emergency: An entire region of the country takes up armed resistance against the federal government, brazenly murdering and raping its African American citizens in a decadeslong campaign of terror that subverts and then rewrites the law.

More dire, certainly, than an invasion of criminal migrants at the border. And it actually happened.

The shockingly violent, depressingly predictable backlash in the American South to the end of slavery, and to the attempt to make freed slaves equal members of society, is the central concern of “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War,” a four-hour PBS series written and narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (It shows in two-hour installments, on Tuesday and on April 16.)

Among the many lacunae in Americans’ knowledge of their own history, our hazy notions of Reconstruction and its overthrow — essential to an understanding of so much in our own times, from the civil rights movement to today’s mirror-like rise of white nationalism — may be the most damaging. Many people, if they have any sense of the era at all, came by it through “Gone With the Wind” or, even more grievously, “The Birth of a Nation.”

So Gates’ series is a great service, especially in its first two hours, which cover the years from the end of the Civil War, with the initial enthusiasm and promise of Reconstruction, to the contested election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, which essentially ended the federal government’s efforts to enforce Reconstruction in the South.

The project mostly hews to the standard PBS history format, with a large cast of scholars and writers — more than 40 — talking over antique photographs and documents, with the occasional impressionistic recreation of events and snippets of gospel and ragtime. But it also incorporates contemporary images of violence and protest, and it is distinguished by Gates’ onscreen presence, talking to the camera while strolling through the story’s locales and interviewing inheritors of the struggle.

Without hitting us over the head, the series continually brings out connections and correspondences between then and now. One of the first great fruits of Reconstruction is the establishment, in the 14th Amendment, of birthright citizenship, now under attack. “Convict leasing” institutionalizes the unwarranted jailing of African American men and women to provide labor for plantations that no longer have slaves. Techniques like poll taxes and literacy tests are quickly invented to suppress the black vote.

“Fake news” campaigns alleging the rape of white women are used to incite and justify the indiscriminate killing and lynching of black men. Minstrelsy and blackface powerfully reinforce notions of white supremacy. Overwhelming efforts in the South to rewrite history and take slavery out of the Civil War narrative lead to the proliferation of Confederate monuments (and thus, more than a century later, to pitched battles and murder in Charlottesville, Virginia).

The series’ second two hours — which cover subjects like the Jim Crow system, the Ku Klux Klan, W.E.B. DuBois, the creation of the NAACP and the ascendance of black popular culture — are engrossing but less urgent. To cover so much ground, they settle into a more anecdotal, great-person approach. (For a more detailed look at some of the stories in this period, seek out the invaluable documentaries of Stanley Nelson, like “The Black Press” and “Tell Them We Are Rising: Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” both streaming online.)

It’s conceivable that “Reconstruction” could be criticized for being one-sided — for not finding someone to defend the romantic view of Confederate history, or to make the contemporary case that white Americans are economically and culturally victimized. It would be a baseless criticism from the point of view of scholarship or principle. One thought, though: The series’s accounts of violence against African Americans tend to have an abstract feeling, and some direct insight into the racist mindset could help to communicate its full force.

“Reconstruction” chooses to tell its story soberly and quietly. From the beginning, it silently establishes a predominant visual motif: photographic portraits of African Americans, singly and in groups small and large, in fields, yards and forest clearings, on church lawns, school steps and front porches. Their subjects look directly into the camera, proudly and, to the modern eye, accusingly. The succession of images insists on their dignity and humanity at a time when these qualities were brutally denied, a point made explicitly late in the series in a segment on the importance of photography in the African American community.

Their descendants continue to make that same case: Half of the 40-plus historians Gates has assembled are black. Calmly dissecting white America’s unceasing claim that they aren’t intelligent or civilized enough for full citizenship, those scholars are the irrefutable answer, still in plain sight after 400 years.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/arts/television/review-reconstruction-pbs.html" id="6b830e12-dca1-3771-a281-bde109b5b019">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

Review: Essential History in 'Reconstruction' on PBS

Scenes like these make D.A. Pennebaker’s 1970 documentary “Original Cast Album: Company,” filmed during the recording of Sondheim’s breakout score, a talisman for fans of the composer, “Company” and Broadway musicals in general. Comedian John Mulaney is all of the above, and his fandom has found expression in “Original Cast Album: Co-op,” Wednesday’s episode in the third season of IFC’s affectionate sendup series, “Documentary Now!”

Written by Mulaney and Seth Meyers, “Co-op” features the cast of a failed musical set in a New York apartment building, who gather for a recording session even as the show’s closing is being announced. Mulaney, in turtleneck and mutton chops, plays a composer strongly resembling Sondheim; Paula Pell, a veteran writer for “Saturday Night Live,” struggles like Stritch; Broadway performers Renée Elise Goldsberry (“Hamilton”) and Alex Brightman (“School of Rock”) belt the showstopper “Holiday Party” aka “A Little Cocaine Tonight.”

I spoke about “Company” and “Co-op” with Meyers, Mulaney and Pennebaker at NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center. I also spoke on the phone with Sondheim. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.

Q: John, you’ve been pitching “Original Cast Album” for “Documentary Now!” since Season 1. Explain your devotion.

JOHN MULANEY: Love of Sondheim, love of “Company,” love of Pennebaker’s work and the documentary itself. I think the reason it connected with me was that the vibe in the room that I feel in that documentary is very similar to what I felt working at “Saturday Night Live.” The exhaustion, and the amazing talent.

SETH MEYERS: “SNL” was a very creative atmosphere and also one where people were excellent at passive aggression. And you really see that —

MULANEY: (clapping) That’s it, yes. That thing of, “Maybe we could try it, but funny this time.” And you’re talking to someone you admire and love and are close friends with but you’ll say things like that. And lastly, though no one else did, I would sometimes smoke cigarettes indoors in 30 Rockefeller (Plaza) because we could get away with it, and so that smoky haze of exhaustion. Very familiar.

D.A. PENNEBAKER: What was amazing and interesting to me was how young some of the people were. They were barely out of college. It had such a feeling of youthful exuberance.

MULANEY: There’s a young woman in her first Broadway show, with a huge orchestra in front of her in a room on, like, 30th Street, just singing the (expletive) out of these songs.

Q: What was most important for getting into character as Sondheim? The cigarette, the 1970s clothes, the sideburns?

MULANEY: It was the most physically comfortable acting I’ve ever done. Because to make my face just kind of fall and look tired and not do anything and not smile, and then occasionally smoke a cigarette and shake my head “No,” is so familiar to me.

Q: We arranged for Sondheim to see the episode and I talked to him afterward, and I’ve got a quote here —

MEYERS: You should see how much John is leaning in.

MULANEY: Please note we all leaned in.

Q: What did you think of Mulaney’s performance?

STEPHEN SONDHEIM: It’s fine. I don’t have any comments on it. Everything’s fine.

Q: I’m going to be talking to Mulaney later this week.

SONDHEIM: Tell him I thought he was really funny.

MULANEY: Oh. Oh. That’s great.

Q: How well did the original documentary capture what went on in the studio that day?

SONDHEIM: Perfectly. Pennebaker knows what he’s doing, he knows what to shoot, when to shoot. It’s as true as a newsreel.

MULANEY: That’s a little better than “fine.”

MEYERS: Well he said “fine” twice.

PENNEBAKER: I knew Elaine and I thought she was a funny person but I didn’t know that ability, to drive passion right through the walls. What she did on that first version (of “The Ladies Who Lunch”), it struck me as one of the most fantastic moments of filming. And then when they said, “It won’t do,” I thought, what’s going on? This is crazy.

Q: How daunting was it to write lyrics in the style of Stephen Sondheim?

MEYERS: If there are quotes about the songs, I think we’d pass at this point.

MULANEY: No, I’d hear them. I read those books [(Sondheim’s “Finishing the Hat” and “Look, I Made a Hat”), and really loved them, and had listened to interviews with him over the years on lyric writing. So I sat for a week or so with the books out, listening to different Sondheim songs, trying to just ape the meter here and there. Also what I had was a rhyming dictionary.

MEYERS: You realize how good he is because you have to work so hard just to make a parody version that is close enough to count.

MULANEY: That line in “Barcelona” when he rhymes “going” with “Boeing,” I was like, all these songs can stink if I can have one rhyme that I like that much.

Q: The songs in “Co-op” are modeled on Sondheim songs, but not necessarily from “Company.”

MULANEY: “Going Up,” the last song, is a bit more like “Merrily We Roll Along.” It kind of has a brighter, more optimistic feel. The opening number (in) “Company” is so complex that I couldn’t even touch it, so I went with “Skid Row” from “Little Shop of Horrors” and copied it, and then our wonderful composer, Eli Bolin, changed the melody so that it was not a copy.

MEYERS: “Holiday Party” is just “Not Getting Married.”

MULANEY: (Puzzled) Oh, “Cocaine Tonight” — Seth Meyers wrote that song top to bottom and it is just dazzling.

Q: Did you have any qualms about a lyric like, “It would seem/such a dream/if I asked her for a dance/But I just/blew a rail/and I’m gonna (mess) my pants.”

MEYERS: You know, comedy writers’ qualms don’t often — pose a challenge.

Q: Just in terms of, Sondheim.

MEYERS: Yes. But also, desperate for a laugh. So weighing those ...

MULANEY: I thought that was an elegant way to use cursing.

MEYERS: Hopefully, when Stephen sat down to watch it, he wasn’t hoping for an equal amount of elegance.

MULANEY: Yes. Exactly. No one wants it to be BETTER than their thing.

SONDHEIM: I thought it was very funny. But I was with some people and the people who had never seen the actual documentary not only didn’t get it, but didn’t think it was fun. Do they get that problem?

MEYERS: We — don’t care.

MULANEY: With this one, even that it’s airing on TV surprises me. Because I was like, No, that was for us. I genuinely am slightly surprised when I see a promotion that it’s going to be on TV, because I go, Oh right, that party we had.

MEYERS: We filmed it! We filmed that party.

Q: How about the songs?

SONDHEIM: (with no apparent irony) Well, I would have to listen again. The lyrics are crowded.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/theater/original-cast-album-co-op-mulaney-meyers-sondheim.html" id="ab138cca-1e94-3164-a614-4f4b01835629">The New York Times</a>.

John Mulaney and Seth Meyers Fondly Send Up Sondheim and He's Amused

Elaine Stritch melting down as she sings “The Ladies Who Lunch” over and over again, into the night. Record producer Thomas Z. Shepard telling her, “It’s just flaccid.” Stephen Sondheim, with elaborate patience, coaching a singer in the proper pronunciation of “bubi.”

Or chalk it up to our apparently bottomless appetite for superhero teams, which television happily feeds: The new series join DC Comics titles like “Legends of Tomorrow,” “Titans” and “Black Lightning” and Marvel shows like “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” “Runaways,” “The Gifted” and “Legion,” to name a few. On the horizon are a couple of heavyweights, HBO’s “Watchmen” adaptation and Netflix’s “Jupiter’s Legacy.”

So what do these two handsomely produced new shows add to the conversation? Continuing proof that comic books and TV shows have very different vocabularies, and that converting the first into the second requires hard choices. The most enjoyable adaptations commit to traditional TV values (“Black Lightning” on CW) or go all in on replicating the comic book experience (“Legion” on FX). Shows that fall in between often exhibit a particular variety of lifelessness — they’re action thrillers in which the action feels forced and they’re family dramas in which we don’t really care about the family.

Which brings us to “The Umbrella Academy,” based on the comics series created by Gerard Way (the multitalented artist who was also lead vocalist of My Chemical Romance) and Gabriel Bá. Like “Doom Patrol,” which Way has generously cited as an influence, it’s about a superpowered band of outsiders assembled by a possibly mad, definitely abrasive genius who doubles as father figure.

And, in this case, as actual father: Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) adopts the seven future members of the Umbrella Academy team as babies, shortly after they’re all born on the same day to mothers who didn’t appear to be pregnant. Frequent flashbacks show them being harshly raised and trained in a dark, many-chambered mansion, giving the show some Harry Potter schoolboy flavor. That motif is emphasized by the prominence in the story of Number Five (Aidan Gallagher), who returns from the future trapped in his 13-year-old body (though he’s aged several decades beyond his 20-something foster siblings) and spends the 10-episode season dressed in his hunter-green, short-pants school uniform.

The show’s primary mode, however — as the estranged team members reunite for their father’s funeral and find themselves under attack by mysterious assassins, one played by Mary J. Blige — could be called “Legion” lite. (The show’s creator, Steve Blackman, was an executive producer on that FX series.)

It takes stabs at hallucinatory, Gregory Crewdson-like visual setups, and it goes for a hybrid futuro-retro production design — the killers receive their orders in pneumatic tubes that pop up wherever they happen to be. The soundtrack, ranging from They Might Be Giants to the Hollies to Nina Simone, feels annoyingly self-conscious.

Its attempts to capture the visual and narrative virtuosity of the comics are halfhearted, though, and we’re left with a polished but increasingly dull version of the same old story: saving the world as a byproduct of overcoming adolescent resentments and family dysfunction; teenage alienation as an apocalyptic force that has to be brought under control. The first episode introduces the stock characters (loyal son, too-perfect daughter, rebel, cynic, screw-up) in lively fashion, but then the story bogs down in anemic mystery and filler, like a risible detour into the Vietnam War.

It’s easy enough to watch, at least until the requisite season-ending big battle, a pale echo of “Carrie.” And there are performances that keep you interested, including Kate Walsh as a kind of time lord, Cameron Britton as a philosophical hit man and especially the 15-year-old Gallagher (of Nickelodeon’s “Nicky, Ricky, Dicky &amp; Dawn,”), who’s remarkably assured as a hard-bitten 58-year-old in a middle-schooler’s body. He carries the show as far as he can.

The news about “Doom Patrol” is provisionally better, though much less definitive, since only two episodes were available. Selectively drawn from the long-running DC series and adapted for TV by Jeremy Carver (“Supernatural”), it’s about an older group of misfits than those in “Umbrella Academy,” and it works in a satirical, high-concept mode rather than teenage melodrama.

The dilapidated heroes present for the show’s inception include self-explanatory Robotman and bandage-swathed Negative Man, voiced by Brendan Fraser and Matt Bomer, along with Elasti-Woman (April Bowlby), whose power and curse is an extreme form of elephantiasis, and Crazy Jane (Diane Guerrero), with as many powers as personalities. They have their own mansion, in the rural Midwest, where they’re overseen by their own eccentric genius (Timothy Dalton).

“Doom Patrol” operates inside big quotation marks, with Alan Tudyk (who plays villain Mr. Nobody) providing an arch, self-referential narrative in which he anticipates critics’ reactions to the show and intones, “Let the pretentious title sequence begin.”

Dressing up the standard superteam tropes with this kind of metafictional framework could get old fast. But a show that gives you a donkey who spells out messages in big green clouds of flatulence gets at least one more week from me.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/arts/television/umbrella-academy-doom-patrol-review.html" id="d33ead16-33db-3a3b-aa11-bd6a6b675664">The New York Times</a>.

It doesn’t seem likely that Netflix and DC Universe, competitors in the field of subscription streaming video, get together to plan their schedules. So chalk it up to coincidence that Netflix is releasing “The Umbrella Academy” on the same day (Friday) that DC Universe is releasing “Doom Patrol,” while you note that the “Doom Patrol” comic books were a primary model, along with “X-Men,” for the “Umbrella Academy” comics.

'The Umbrella Academy' and 'Doom Patrol' Feature Strangely Similar Super-Teams

And as it turns out, he can also be a depressed, guilt-ridden loner, as John Malkovich is forced to play him in “The ABC Murders,” a three-part miniseries now available on Amazon Prime Video.

British screenwriter Sarah Phelps has been taking liberties with Agatha Christie’s mystery tales, on behalf of the Christie estate and the BBC, for a while now — “ABC Murders,” based on the 1936 novel of the same name, is the fourth miniseries she’s adapted from the books. Her method is extreme makeover, redoing Christie’s plots and reshaping her sensibility in a lurid and ominous fashion that, combined with top-flight casts, produced entertaining results with “And Then There Were None” and “Ordeal by Innocence.”

“The ABC Murders” is Phelps’ most thorough teardown yet, and this time she’s so suffocatingly revisionist that what’s left isn’t really Christie at all. The insistence on making everything grimmer and grosser is almost comically complete.

Most of the characters, and the broad outline of Christie’s mystery, are still there. Poirot, the peerless Belgian detective now living in London, receives letters signed “ABC.” They announce the dates on which murders will take place and the towns where they will occur; as the murders duly transpire, the alphabetical motif becomes clear: Mrs. Asher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, and so on.

In the book, the focus is, as always, on detection, with Poirot’s inquiries paralleling and eventually outpacing those of Scotland Yard, represented by the supercilious Inspector Crome. For Phelps, detective work is a necessary evil, condensed to the point that it’s barely intelligible.

What she’s after are psychology — a tool for Christie, an end-all for Phelps — and relevance. In the service of the first, Phelps amplifies minor plot points and passing comments in the book and casts Poirot as past his prime, fearful of decrepitude and insignificance.

She isolates Poirot by eliminating his colleague Hastings (who narrates the novel) and makes him a figurative and literal stand-in for the murderer (an idea that’s an incidental red herring in the book). And he is, indeed, riven with remorse, courtesy of a new bit of back story that’s likely to enrage the Christie faithful.

Hercule Poirot is a flexible little fellow. He can be dapper and twinkling, as David Suchet played him for 24 years on television. He can be vigorously obsessive-compulsive, as Kenneth Branagh played him in “Murder on the Orient Express” in 2017.

Mike Hale

Articles written by the author

Review: Amazon's 'Hanna,' Genetically Modified for Streaming Video

In 'Turn Up Charlie,' the Manny Isn't Just a Man, He's Idris Elba

Review: 'The Boys' Deconstructs the Superhero, With a Light Touch

'South Side' and 'Sherman's Showcase': Two Flavors of Nostalgia

'Veronica Mars' and the One-Great-Season Debate

'Veronica Mars' and the One-Great-Season Debate

Review: Good Cop, Bad Cop, Crazy Cop in 'Line of Duty'

Review: 'Chernobyl,' the Disaster Movie

Review: In 'Dead to Me' on Netflix, Widows Make the Best BFFs

'Bosch' Is Back, Still on the Straight and Narrow

Review: Essential History in 'Reconstruction' on PBS

John Mulaney and Seth Meyers Fondly Send Up Sondheim and He's Amused

John Mulaney and Seth Meyers Fondly Send Up Sondheim and He's Amused

'The Umbrella Academy' and 'Doom Patrol' Feature Strangely Similar Super-Teams

In Amazon's 'ABC Murders,' John Malkovich Is a Sad Poirot

Review: 'I Am the Night' Stitches Together Los Angeles Neo-Noir Clichés

Review: A Netflix Legal Thriller Weighs Genocide and Guilt

Review: In Showtime's 'Black Monday,' Financial Ruin, With Laughs

Review: 'Informer' Finds a Fresh Take on the Terrorism Thriller

Review: 'You're the Worst' Heads Toward Happily Ever After. Maybe.