Woody Allen’s period piece script should have stayed in the drawer
The Show: Crisis in Six Scenes, Season 1, Episode 5 The Moment: Couples therapy
Kay (Elaine May), a therapist, listens to Lorna (Nina Arianda) and Moe’s (Gad Elmaleh) story: Lorna discovered Moe was having sex with prostitutes. Kay suggested he pay Lorna instead. It worked. Paying her was exciting. So what’s the problem?
“She started charging too much,” Moe says. “I’m not a low-class bimbo,” Lorna says. “I’m not paying my wife $700 a pop!” Moe protests.
“Well, I’m not doing it for $200 anymore,” Lorna says.
“Why not? You can work at home,” Moe counters.
“I think we can work this out,” Kay says. “You could maybe give him a discount. He does use you regularly.”
Ba-dum-bum! I’m sure this series of six half-hour episodes looked great on paper: Written and directed by Woody Allen, it’s set in the 1960s, and stars Allen as Sidney, a semi-famous writer, with May as his wife. Their squarely middle-class lives are shaken up by the arrival of a friend’s daughter Lennie (Miley Cyrus), a counter-culture revolutionary on the lam.
But as you may have gleaned from the scene above, the comedy itself feels like it’s been mouldering somewhere since the ’60s. Allen showed filmmaker Barbara Kopple in her 1997 documentary Wild Man Blues that he keeps story ideas on scraps of paper in a bedside table drawer. It feels like he pried this show’s vaudeville shtick from the back of that drawer.
There’s some pleasure in watching the game cast, mostly oldsters, try to blow the dust off retro routines. But sometimes what happens in the bedside table should stay in the bedside table. Crisis in Six Scenes streams on Amazon Prime. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.