In case you didn’t know, Amazon Prime has joined the recent wave of websites generating original content. Amazon has a cool way of doing it though. They create some pilots and let their viewers vote on which ones get a full season. This is their third time doing it, and they have 5 new pilots for people to look at (for free by the way).
Red Oaks
Director David Gordon Green, known for his indie darlings and stoner comedies. smashes his two usual types in this ’80s era coming-of-age tale. It stars Submarine‘s Craig Roberts as David, an accounting college student who has an existential crisis when his father (played by the very underrated Richard Kind) confesses to never loving David’s mother during what he thought was his last breath. His father ultimately survives and there is simply no going back.
In the face of this new information, David turns down an internship at his father’s accounting firm and instead coaches tennis at the local country club. Roberts is a promising up-and-comer, having already mastered dry wit, and now he must navigate the world of elitist grown-ups and idiot co-workers. The country club (the titular Red Oaks) is Caddyshack meets Adventureland, a collection of stoners, hotties, and douchebags drinking and smoking to their heart ‘s content during the best period of the ’80s: the one full of crimped hair, popped collars, and thong lycra aerobic one-pieces.
Roberts balances his dry wit and the show’s exaggerated tone with a sad sense of confusion. It establishes a strong dramatic backbone that helps move the plot along as David tries to piece back together everything he used to think about love, family, and his future. It only scratches the surface of the topic, but it is ONLY a pilot. It is well-trodden ground that is in desperate need of a new voice, but I think Green’s combination of sensibilities can be that voice.
A-
Really
This pilot is also directed by a pretty well known director. Jay Chandrasekhar, the directing member of Broken Lizard. The Lizard crew may not have been up to snuff since Super Troopers, but Jay has been doing great work on TV shows such as “Community” and “Arrested Development.” It is about time he tries to do something on his own.
“Really” is essentially an R-rated version of “Friends” free to examine the frustrations and challenges of having real adult relationships. It stars a pretty large ensemble cast including the likes of “Scrubs” alumni Sarah Chalke and Travis Schuldt, Hellboy‘s Selma Blair, Twitter’s funniest tweeter Rob Delaney, and a number of recognizable faces from some of TV’s highest profile sitcoms. In it’s first 30 minutes, it attacks such topics as trying to have an exciting sex life while also being a parent, trying to keep the glory days of college going after they are long gone, and the occasional marital infraction when too many unhappily married couples spend too much time together.
Unfortunately, it loses points for some of the uninspired dialog. In one moment, the group talks about reality shows as if they have never been complained about before. It is almost as if someone was trying out their stand-up comedy act, but once the interpersonal dialog got going rather than the pop culture crap, the chemistry really shined. Not unlike “Red Oaks,” “Really” again covers some pretty well-trodden ground in desperate need of a new voice. It is not quite as refreshing as “Red Oaks,” but the mature content does allow for a more brutal style of honesty than similar sitcoms have in the past.
B+
The Cosmopolitans
Unfortunately, “The Cosopolitans” was not as fun as the others. It involves the lives of a few American expatriates as they try to restart their lives in Paris, France. The only problem is there lives haven’t really started yet. No talk of how they are making their money, but there are a lot of artistic and lofty pursuits. Mostly, they just talk about love and sex, and how they can get one or the other if even for a short while. It is very reminiscent of HBO’s “Girls” except filtered through Wes Anderson or maybe Noah Baumbach. The dialog is very over-written but has an inherent lyricism. When it works, it’s great, but when it fails, it’s horrid. Not a whole lot of wiggle room.
Take for instance one of the leads, Adam Brody. Brody excels at lending a certain geek, neurotic charm to just about any kind of dialog. He’s very much at home in this series. He knows how to key in and bring to life the lyricism within the writing. Unfortunately, his on-screen bud, Jordan Rountree, can’t muster the same kind of screen presence. He is very matter-of-fact which leeches all that same lyricism. Throw in a few female supporting characters like Carrie MacLeore’s rookie expat, who seems stoned most of the time, and Chloe Sevigny’s expert expat, whose pretentiousness is just too much to stand even though she is clearly the series villain, and you have a cast of insufferable adults to old to still be spinning their wheels. It’s annoying, and it’s the same reason why “Girls” just never sat right with me.
The European characters were far more fun. Adrianno Giannini played Sandro, an Italian perpetual bachelor and self-named ladies’ man. He is very good at giving his American friends unsolicited relationship advice. He finds himself at odds with the playboy Parisian socialite, Fritz, played by Freddy Asblom. Freddy is incredibly funny and effortlessly cool. He is who Andre from “The League” wants to be. The two of them have the bulk of the punchlines, while the others just fumble through a series of misadventures roaming from party to event to pub over and over.
D
Hand of God
Hand of God is in good company. Religious melodramas seem to be really in right now like The Leftovers, The Returned, and to a lesser degree True Detective. If only HBO’s John from Cincinnati had been aired at a different time period I might have been able to see more than one season of it. This one stars Ron Perlman (Hellboy) as Pernell Harris, a powerful judge with a reputation for giving the maximum sentence. As the series starts out, he is speaking tongues while naked bathing in a public fountain. As it turns out, his guilt-ridden son tried to commit suicide (leaving him comatose and most likely braindead) after not being able to stop the rape of his wife.
The judge now born again as far as he is concerned, starts receiving messages from God, or at least what he believes to be messages from God. The show plays fast and loose with whether or not the judge is witnessing divination or is just plain crazy. He uses these messages to find those who have avoided justice. The series buys a lot of clout from me personally for casting Ron Perlman in the lead role. He is an incredibly underrated actor, and they give him plenty work to chew on, not just snappy dialog but some moments of deep-seated anger and sadness.
It has a big cast of characters including the judge’s enabling wife, a manipulative preacher, and a violent believer that works as the judge’s right hand carrying out the dirtier work. It is a bit of a slog to introduce each character with all their quirks and faults right at the beginning of the pilot, but once they get over that hump, the story gets much tighter and neater. It will have to continue that level of tautness if it wants to survive. It is missing the elements of today’s prestige dramas like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad that subverted those crime saga genres and instead resembles something much more pulpy.
B-/C+
Hysteria
Hysteria is apparently based on a true story about a group of high school girls who all started exhibiting the same twitchy behavior in Le Roy, New York. The people behind the series seem to be pitching as a sort of alternative to the usual bitey decomposing zombie stuff, which usually I would be totally down for. The premise kind of reminds me of the movie Pontypool, which is one of the coolest alternate zombie movies I have ever seen.
Unfortunately, this series right off the bat kind of loses me by making it into a parable against social media. It’s a stance that I have yet to really take seriously. Every meme against it is pretty much only photoshopped to impress people on facebook or twitter so I call bullshit right there. In real life, everyone I have bumped into who has had a similar “philosophy” (using the term lightly) has either been an old person or a Luddite peer. The girls who catch this illness also happen to be doing things they “shouldn’t” be doing at their age like booze, drugs, and sex with non-white boys there father’s clearly wouldn’t approve of, it all just feels like a horror movie from a different era….but with smart phones. Oh, and the lead character of the group is having an affair with a 30-something married police officer, who’s guilt and shame over the affair steals a lot of the sympathy from the crazed stalker teenager.
Luckily, the doctor investigating the outbreak is pretty good. American Pie‘s Mena Suvari injects quite a bit of life into this often dull and misguided horror story. She is incredibly charming when she is working with her patients, especially in one scene where she passive-aggressively asks a demanding parent to leave the room. At the same time, her traumatic backstory reads like a prestige drama checklist. At least, it is handled with a subtle hand and allows for Suvari to imply a dramatic weight in her other scenes rather than slow down the pilot in general.
C-/D+
