Feminist comedy ‘Dollface’ on Hulu
Female solidarity looms large in the new comedy “Dollface,” streaming all 10 episodes on Hulu, starting today. Five years into a relationship, Jules (Kat Dennings) finds herself dumped by her boyfriend and suddenly discovers that she has essentially abandoned all of her female friends.
The series begins with a surreal fantasy touch as Jules rides a bus filled with crying, dumped women, driven by a literal “cat lady” and deposited at a depot where there is nobody to meet her.
This symbol-laden reverie seems funnier than what follows. Jules teams up with her resentful old friends and sorority sisters, Madison (Brenda Song, “The Suite Life on Deck”) and Stella (Shay Mitchell, “Pretty Little Liars”). Much of their dialogue concerns the need for women to support each other and fairly drips with feminist dogma. Whether this is satire is unclear.
As if to compensate,
Madison and Stella are drop-dead gorgeous and live posh lifestyles with no visible means of support. Esther Povitsky (“Alone Together”) also stars as a needy co-worker who toils at a lifestyle brand named WOOM, a parody of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.
› Deadpan demands some kind of context. You have to actually care about the subject being documented, or spoofed. Now streaming on Netflix, the series “I’m With the Band: Nasty Cherry” follows a quickly cobbled-together girl band. We soon learn that few of the “musicians” have ever played before and were cast more for their looks and attitudes. The producer/creator’s patter offers “Spinal Tap”-like bromides about her band’s potential, but delusion will take you only so far.
› “Pariah: The Lives and Deaths of Sonny Liston” (9 p.m., Showtime, TV-MA) looks at the life and controversial death of one of the great boxers of the 20th century, a man twice defeated by Muhammad Ali.
Few sports figures had such a meteoric rise and fall. Liston shocked the world when he defeated beloved boxing champion
Floyd Patterson in 1962. A mere eight years later, he was found dead of unclear causes in a Las Vegas hotel room, the victim of a possible drug overdose.
As much as Ali was idolized during the 1960s, Liston was cast as a thug, a figure associated with boxing’s criminal underside. His mysterious death has inspired a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. “Pariah” includes interviews with boxer Mike Tyson and
many boxing historians.
› Based on the 1962 novel by Phillip K. Dick, Amazon Prime’s adaptation “The Man in the High Castle” enters its fourth and final season. This stylish, if baffling, series imagines life in the United States in the early 1960s with America divided into German and Japanese zones of control owing to our nation’s loss in World War II.
Contact Kevin McDonough at kevin .tvguy@gmail.com.