New summer shows offer rerun relief
Summer offerings won’t be lining up for Emmys, but they’re still worth a look
What to read, where to go, what to watch: Summer can be rather bossy, culture-wise, but it’s still mostly a no-pressure proposition where TV is concerned.
Aside from a few big-ticket temptations such as HBO’s Sharp Objects (debuting July 8), the networks seem to regard this summer as a time to worry less and experiment more. The new shows won’t necessarily garner high praise or Emmy buzz; they simply have to be diverting enough to keep up with the churn.
STRANGE ANGEL
(New episodes Thursdays on
CBS All Access Canada; debuted June 14), CBS’s subscription streaming service has been slow to add original content, but so far I like the unexpected risks it is taking. After all, who would make (or watch), a drama based on the true story of a 1930s college dropout named Jack Parsons (Jack Reynor), whose obsession with space travel leads him to jump-start Southern California’s rocket science industry and join a kooky cult that conducts sexmagic rituals?
It might not work as an elevator pitch, but Reynor’s brash performance keeps the fuel flowing long enough for a viewer’s curiosity to take over.
AMERICAN JAIL
(CNN, July 1) TV viewers have had ample opportunity to understand the mass-incarceration crisis and its racist origins, in the U.S. from projects as serious as Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary 13th to incisively outrageous reports from Daily Showstyle correspondents. At first, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Roger Ross Williams doesn’t seem to break much news in American Jail, in which he returns to his hometown of Easton, Penn., to discover that just about all the black men he grew up with wound up in the penal system, starting with the jail perched on a bluff overlooking the city.
After realizing that the homophobia that drove him out of town probably spared him from a similar fate, Williams takes up the anger of old friends and neighbours and asks how an entire community can seem so fated to imprisonment.
SHARP OBJECTS
(HBO Canada, July 8) Easily the summer’s most anticipated drama series, this eight-episode thriller (from Unreal creator Marti Noxon and Big Little Lies director Jean-Marc Vallée), adapts Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel about Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), a burnt-out, alcoholic newspaper reporter from St. Louis who is assigned to go back to her small hometown of Wind Gap, Mo., and write about the murder of one girl and the disappearance of another.
The cast includes Patricia Clarkson, as Camille’s genteel yet emotionally unstable mother, and Chris Messina, as the town’s newly arrived police detective.
DISENCHANTMENT
(Netflix Canada, Aug. 17) A new Matt Groening series doesn’t come along often, and perhaps Disenchantment will do for medieval lore what The Simpsons did for suburbia and Futurama did for notions of Tomorrowland. A preview glimpse of the show from Netflix at least confirms that Groening ’s sensibility and dark humour are both quite intact, maybe more so without the constraints of broadcast TV. Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson voices the main character, Princess Bean of Dreamland, whose resistance to an arranged marriage leads her to pal up with an itinerant elf (Nat Faxon), and acquire a personal demon (Eric Andre).