PicoBlog

“Generations are echoing.” At the end of the day, most TV shows can be broken down into two categories: Shows about families and shows about found families. But for Maya Lopez those options don’t look so simple. Her mother died young, her grandmother rejected her, her father was murdered in front of her, and the father figure who took her under his wing was more interested in using her as a weapon than prioritizing her happiness.

A few days ago, I finally got around to watching Maestro, the only one of this year’s Best Picture nominees I hadn’t yet seen. I liked the movie overall. Bradley Cooper is a good director, attentive to both the subtleties of performance and the inventive visual storytelling that cinema allows; for the first 40 minutes or so of his film, I was feeling pretty jazzed about it. But once the action shifted away from Leonard Bernstein’s wondrous career and to his troubled marriage—right as the image changed from black-and-white to color—the energy flagged and never fully recovered.

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the latest installment of FX’s anthology drama Feud. This review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. To read along for only $5 a month, become a supporter of Episodic Medium. How do you feel about what-might’ve-beens? All those movies abandoned or lost? The aborted albums? The unpublished books? Does it excite you to get even the smallest sense of what was intended, via whatever surviving fragments still exist?

I confess that I was unfamiliar with Jon Robin Baitz’s work before he was announced as the writer/show-runner of this Feud season. I’ve neither read nor seen any of his plays; but given that he has either won or been nominated for Drama Desk Awards, Pulitzer Prizes and a Guggenheim Fellowship, I’m going to assume his work in the theater is exceptional. I also haven’t seen any of the TV episodes he wrote for The West Wing, Alias, Brothers & Sisters or The Slap, nor have I seen Stonewall or People I Know, two of the movies he wrote.

It’s baked into For All Mankind’s premise that what was an exciting new horizon in one season will become comparatively mundane in the next: although you could argue that one should never find space travel and exploration “boring,” there’s no question that life at Happy Valley this season is very different from the high stakes environment we saw after the initial race to Mars in season three. That said, the biggest problem with season four is just how boring Mars has been to this point.

“The reason doesn’t matter. Mars matters.” I appreciate the ambiguity of the high-stakes scenario that ends “Legacy.” For much of its running time, we are firmly embedded within Dev and Ed’s effort to “steal an asteroid,” enlisting the help of Sam and Miles to secure the necessary supplies to effectively hijack the communications of Happy Valley and direct the Ranger to burn for five extra seconds and bring the asteroid firmly into Mars’ orbit.

“Progress is never free. There is always a cost.” The narrative maneuver that comes with the end of every season of For All Mankind is a significant burden. We’ve talked about this in the context of the beginning of the next season, which has to deal with the gap in characters’ lives as we pick things up years after the fact. However, it also means that whatever narrative momentum a finale is going to generate, the actual end of that episode is going to be a gesture to the future that has to serve as both an epilogue to the story that just finished and a hint at a potential path should the show be renewed for another season.

Share Liam Rudden - Must See Theatre The road to hell is paved with good intentions, that’s what they say. It’s also well known that the devil is in the detail. Both are adages that could be applied to the latest production of Hadestown, newly opened on London’s West End. Drawing on the Greek myth telling the ill-fated story of  Orpheus and Eurydice, Hadestown transports the classic to a post-depression industrial underworld, a place where the poverty stricken are forced to become another’s property to survive, signing away their life, if not their soul.

I don’t know what the answer is, so I’m gonna move past it.  First, a word about political correctness. This should be fun. That It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been on the air a record-breaking 16 seasons of acclaimed (although Emmy-snubbed) TV comedy is a testament to the fact that all of the whining old comics claiming "comedians can’t say anything anymore” are full of sour, constipated crap. Dee, Dennis, Charlie, Mac, and Frank sail upon seas of inappropriate behavior, filthy language, abusive put-downs, and the sort of airy awfulness of spirit that would make the Seinfeld gang run screaming for separate limos.