Peacock imports ‘Five Bedrooms’
Peacock begins streaming the Australian dramedy “Five Bedrooms.” The series has a concept so obvious, you wonder why it hasn’t been made before. Until you realize that it’s really a scripted series constructed like a reality show.
We’ve all seen the show or movie about single people making a vow to get married to each other if they haven’t found a special someone by age 30, or some other milestone. “Bedrooms” explores desperate singles ready to start that very important relationship: not with another person, but with a house. Five friends pool their resources to buy a place and live together, much to the confusion of their neighbors. Many suspect that they’re engaged in polygamy or other such cultlike behavior.
In a nice 21st-century twist, “Bedrooms” isn’t about love, family or sex. It’s about acquisition. As one character observes, together, they have two and a half times the purchasing power of a married couple. That’s the kind of dialogue you usually assign to marketing types describing their desired demographic.
Another house-dweller describes their situation as a “social experiment,” a hifalutin term used to describe reality shows ever since “The Real World” showed up in the early 1990s.
› Speaking of familiar fare from a streaming source, HBO Max debuts “Selena + Chef,” hosted by Selena Gomez, formerly of “Wizards of Waverly Place.” Normally, a 28-year-old actress might find more exciting outlets and leave cooking to culinary experts. But these aren’t normal times, and “Chef” is shot as a quarantine cooking show, with every episode produced in the home of the former “Barney & Friends” star.
No offense to Gomez, but this series marks another notch in the devolution of cooking series.
Time was, you watched someone unglamorous like Julia Child or Sara Moulton to learn something new and interesting. They provided recipes and taught you how to cook. At some point, food and cooking shows needed the “Bam!” that larger-than-life personalities like Emeril could provide. And once you relegated food television to cooking stars, it was only a matter of time before we were reduced to merely watching stars cooking.
For the uninitiated, Peacock and HBO Max are new streaming services, from NBC Universal and WarnerMedia, respectively. For reasons it would take a business column to explain, neither service is available on Roku or Amazon Fire, the two most popular streaming devices. They can be accessed on the web, Apple TV devices and personal digital devices.