By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
It’s easy for great shows to get overlooked during this era of Peak TV, especially with the content spread over a variety of providers. Here are three that are must-sees, just in time to binge with your visiting relatives.
Courtesy HBO
In Watchmen, police have to wear masks to protect their identities — and therefore their families — from domestic terrorists called the Seventh Kavalry, who also wear masks. Detective Abar (Regina King, right) is a detective, and detectives go one better than uniforms with superhero personae. Hers is “Sister Night.”
'WATCHMEN' (HBO)
It’s based on a comic book, so naturally Captain Comics would watch it, and write about it. That’s no surprise. What is surprising is just how good Watchmen is.
The nine-episode series — no word yet on a second season — is based on the famous 1985 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but is not a slavish adaptation. (For that, see Zack Snyder’s 2009 movie.) Instead, it’s the most courageous, unblinking look at racism I’ve ever seen on television, and almost as an afterthought, it’s dressed in superhero drag.
That merciless gaze at a controversial problem is one of the ways the TV show is, at least in spirit, like the graphic novel. But, while it feels the same, while the 2019 show uses the same alternate history as the 1985 book, while some of the characters are the same … it’s not the same.
And yet it is. You have to practically X-ray the show to find its predecessor’s bones. But when you do, shockingly, there they are.
For example, the graphic novel starts with a murder investigation, then a surprising find in a hidden closet changes everything about the murder. The TV show starts exactly the same way, only with all the nouns changed. Further, the graphic novel ends with a hand reaching for something that may change everything again — but we fade to black and are left wondering if that hand reached its object, and whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing if it did. Similarly, at the end of the TV show a foot stretches forth, and if it reaches its object it will change everything … or it will change nothing. But the show fades to black, and we are left with the same anxiety, the same uncertainty, the same questions, as the end of the book 32 years ago.
The show and the GN are similar in other spiritual ways, too — both embrace complexity, and refuse to give us simple answers. Both enjoy deflating archetypes and thwarting audience expectations. The print version, for example, delights in demonstrating that its superheroes are neither super, nor heroes (and all are damaged). The screen version is similarly involved in showing how all the simplistic methods and attitudes we associate with tough-guy, maverick law enforcement (like Jean Smart’s FBI Agent Laurie Blake) are counterproductive (sorry, ‘70s cop shows), and that even the narrative assumptions of the villains lead to unexpected, unpredictable consequences.
And both have a major existential theme — just not the same one. Watchmen the comic book addressed the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon, the biggest threat of its time. Watchmen the TV show does the same — only it posits today’s biggest danger to be white racism/nationalism, and the show tackles it with surprisingly naked honesty.
There are a million other superficial similarities between the two, and I could fill several columns listing them. But, honestly, that’s just an exercise in pedantry (albeit a fun one). Both are their own animals, telling different stories, using (poisonously flawed) superhero tropes as the delivery system. Both caution that, per Nietzche, one must be careful when fighting monsters, lest one become a monster.
Showrunner Damon Lindelof received a lot of criticism for raising a host of interesting questions, using superior directing technique, in his previous series Lost, and then bungling the ending with a truncated, dissatisfying reveal. It’s clear he learned his lesson. Watchmen is everything Lost viewers loved — but this time Lindelof sticks the landing.
Courtesy Apple TV+
When the Russians beat the U.S. to the Moon in For All Mankind, the world we know is changed in ways that are so well done as to seem oddly familiar.
'FOR ALL MANKIND' (Apple TV+)
I confess I would on occasion confuse my alternate American histories from Watchmen and For All Mankind; in the former Richard Nixon remains president until 1992, while in the latter he is defeated in the 1972 election by Ted Kennedy. Aside from alt-histories, though, they share only one other trait: quality.
The elevator pitch for Apple’s effort is right there in the first five minutes of the first episode: What if the Russians got to the Moon first?
Obviously, the Space Race would never end. The first season (a second is already in the works) takes us from 1969 to 1983 with a full-blown embrace of the era in which it is set. The technology is limited. The rah-rah, patriotic bravado is un-ironic. Men drink a lot and cheat on their wives. Women are shunted into kitchens and roles as helpmeets, some embracing their role with a fixed, glassy smile and some daring to fight for more. (And that’s just the middle-class white folks. God help you if you were “other” in 1969, which we also get to see.) Everyone smokes, and they smoke all the time, and they smoke everywhere.
It is, in every way, the way I remember the period as a crew-cut kid in a long-haired world – because like the sons in For All Mankind, I lived in a military family that held onto the 1950s almost into the ‘70s. As someone who was there, I know that they got 1969, suburban America exactly right. It’s breathtaking in its verisimilitude.
Then there are the space scenes. If you were there for Apollo, you will remember being on the edge of your seat as you stayed up for liftoffs from Cape Canaveral, listened to scratchy radio transmissions from lunar orbit, watched grainy footage of astronauts moving in slo-mo in a lifeless, alien environment. It was thrilling. It was riveting.
It was terrifying.
While no one liked to talk about it out loud, this was the most dangerous work imaginable. Anything could go wrong, anywhere, anytime. A busted valve. A fuel leak. A bad calculation. And if it did go wrong … well, nobody talked about that, either. Because everyone involved would die. There was no hope of rescue. None. Worse, we’d probably see our astronaut heroes die on TV … and maybe not quickly.
For All Mankind gets it all exactly right, including the terror. Since the (low) tech isn’t reliable, and since it’s an ensemble show, anybody can die at any time. Accidents in space leave both the characters and the audience gasping for breath.
Speaking of the ensemble, the actors in this show are just terrific, delivering the whip-smart script with understated conviction. Standouts include leads Joel Kinnaman (Suicide Squad) and Shantel VanSanten (The Flash) as a fictional astronaut and his wife; Michael Dorman and Sarah Jones as fictional married astronauts; Jodi Balfour as a closeted lesbian astronaut; Chris Bauer as the historically accurate Deke Slayton; Krys Marshall as the first black, female astronaut; Sonya Wagner as the first female astronaut (and a historical pastiche); Wrenn Schmidt as a driven engineer/flight director ... well, the list goes on. Even the voice actors doing Nixon, Kennedy and other politicians are convincing.
That would be enough to make For All Mankind extraordinary. But then a more subversive consequence begins to raise its ugly head. Yes, the Space Race continues unabated, but so does the Cold War. In our world, the Soviet Union fell into decay in the ‘80s, and fell apart soon after. Not in this world, in which space success reinvigorates the moribund society. And the second season is going to show us just how hot the Cold War can be, especially in the frigid lunar atmosphere where there is no law.
Courtesy Amazon Prime
The Expanse gives us future so well thought out that we understand the politics and culture of not only Earth, but Mars and The Belters.
'THE EXPANSE' (AMAZON PRIME)
This show dropped its fourth season Dec. 13, so many reading this may have already watched it … in which case I’m probably preaching to the choir. The Expanse is such an incredibly well-done show that I can’t imagine any genre fan not liking it.
The Expanse is set in a future solar system that has nowhere else to go, and friction increases among the three major power bases as elbow room decreases: an overpopulated, pseudo-democratic Earth; an authoritarian Mars engaged in a generations-long terraforming project; and “The Belters,” people who basically live in spaceships, mining the asteroid belt and the outer planets for mineral wealth. The Belters are the most interesting, because they are the most unusual: They live basically in tribes/factions, united only in their hatred of the “Inners” who take advantage of them; after generations in zero-G they can no longer live in normal gravity; and they have developed their own language, a strange patois of various slangy lingos that sounds like you should be able to understand it, but you don’t.
In the midst of all this political fervor — which The Expanse explores thoroughly, which sounds boring but isn’t – comes the first thing from an extra-solar civilization. A “protomolecule” that everyone who learns about it wants to keep secret, and control. But the protomolecule has plans of its own — it likes to overwrite life wherever it finds it — and embeds a contact with one specific person who becomes, with his three-man crew, the viewers’ POV.
If you want to know what this guy is like, consider that he favors references to Don Quixote. His crew is an eclectic mishmash of characters, a Martian pilot who favors Western drawl (although he’s never been to Earth), a Belter mechanic with strong opinions and Amos, who …
Oh, man, Amos. Where to begin? Amos is very quiet … the quiet of the eye of the hurricane. He is most scary when he is not moving. Amos is so damaged from childhood trauma that he is the very definition of a sociopath – absent empathy, and literally unable to tell right from wrong. He’s aware of this failing, and depends on others to provide him with the guidance or social cues to, I dunno, keep from killing someone who bumps into him. Every time someone speaks to him, I wonder "How is he processing that?" Because his blank eyes give no clue, and however he interprets what he hears, it won't be like you and me.
Since this series is based on novels — basically each season covers one book — it's not static. No sooner do we think that we understand the Earth-Mars-Belter problems well enough to see a way out, everything changes at the end of the third season (the last on Syfy, before the move to Amazon Prime). All the coalitions unraveled, motivations changed and new dangers arose. Which, people being people, and therefore greedy, short-sighted and self-interested, means a whole lot of folks are going to die.
But they’re going to look good doing it. Just like Watchmen and For All Mankind, the production values of this show are over the Moon (and Mars, and a few asteroids). The scripts are sharp, the acting engaging.
It’s Peak TV. And these three shows are head and shoulders above the rest. Consider this recommendation to be my gift to you during the holiday season.
Find Captain Comics by email (capncomics@aol.com), on his website (captaincomics.ning.com), on Facebook (Andrew Alan Smith) or on Twitter (@CaptainComics).
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