Atlanta (2016-22)

This one leaves a pretty large hole in the television landscape. Atlanta was a landmark. It was experimental. It spent whole episodes without a glimpse of our main characters. It pulled stories from real life. It was raucous and poignant. It had something to say about the black experience in America. And then in its penultimate season they go to Europe and speak to the black American experience abroad. It bravely portrayed white people in a way no other show dares to. Its bizarre-ness is explained in its final episode with a not wholly original but brilliantly executed meta sensory deprived dream. It went from a black Justin Bieber to a white Teddy Perkins to a trannsracial man being interviewed on a Charlie Rose type talk show.

Donald Glover can do just about anything and everything. Brian Tyree Henry is now a highly sought after actor, who I apparently saw on stage in Book of Mormon years before Atlanta, and who stole the show in the excellent If Beale Street Could Talk. I think Hiro Murai also gets a lot of credit for the look and dreamlike feel of the show. And I don't know who the music supervisor is, but they're first rate.

The Good Fight (2017-22)

The Kings' spinoff of The Good Wife (a stellar legal drama in its own righht) was the perfect way for CBS to enter the streaming wars. The Kings took a successful show, a formula that worked, and were permitted to experiment with profanity, more taboo teams not allowed on network television, and even animated musical segments. They challenged the censors, and memorably let their audience know CBS censored their satirical song on China in a meta episode about censorship. The Good Fight was the boon we needed in the Trump era. When the world turned tipsy turvy, The Good Fight satirized us by cranking up the absurdity further. It gave us a way to process the craziness around us. They rolled with the punches when the pandemic came around, always the most topical show on television. They brought back their cast of kooky judges and Chicagoland lawyers from The Good Wife, and even elevated Audra McDonald to a leading role. At the black law firm of Reddick & Boseman, we were introduced to many excellent black actors. And they played high powered lawyers! That was unheard of before and I hope those roles continue to be written. Clever and timely, poignant and funny-- though I'm not generally a proponent for TV spinoffs, I always looked forward to The Good Fight.

Straight Line Crazy (The Shed) (2022)

It's my first time to The Shed. Aglaia had the foresight to get Culture Pass tickets for a Wednesday matinee. Tickets sold out fast, even when they released a new block, and they were going for hundreds of dollars. It's a decent sized theater on the sixth floor. The stage juts out into the audience, three-quarters in the round. It's interesting (in that you're really close to the action) but it's sort of unnecessary. It requires them to block the scenes in an awkward way. They move around in circles constantly as they converse so that they're sometimes facing you and sometimes facing away. At the back of the stage, there are some extras that don't really have lines.

There are also some weird narrative choices. Act I centers on Robert Moses's early career building the Northern and Southern State Parkways on Long Island, challenging the unsympathetic landed gentry. Act II focuses on his failed attempt to build a highway through Washington Square Park toward the end of his career. We have Jane Jacobs to thank for his defeat, and she shows up in the play as a rather major character, despite them never having met. In Act I, she interjects with totally unnecessary narration. I actually think all the narration is kind of cheesy. The play would have benefited from ending Act I and Act II at the end of the scene, at the height of the drama, instead of closing with narration. Honestly, we could do without Jane Jacobs altogether. The scenes in Washington Square Park are awkward. The peanut gallery reacts to the protests and public hearings by looking straight at the audience and exclaiming pointlessly. And the play loses momentum whenever Ralph Fiennes isn't on stage. Fiennes is phenomenal as always. His repartee is quick and his posture impeccable. His accent was a little difficult to understand at first but I got used it.

What I do like is that Act I build Moses up. And Act II takes him down. He accomplished a lot in his long career. The play just focuses in on these two key moments and gives the audience both sides of the coin. We are allowed to make our own judgments. What's kind of ironic is that the times have shifted. It has been nearly a hundred years since the events of Act I. Moses believed that cars were the future, and he was right, partially because he built New York that way, and the rest of the country followed suit. But we've now come all the way around to where Manhattan is about to institute congestion pricing. Cars are the enemy now. Unfortunately, thanks to Moses, we're already all-in on cars.

1776 (Broadway)

Roundabout's revival of 1776 recasts America's founding fathers as female and non-binary. This might perhaps be more shocking in a pre-Hamilton era but nowadays the founding fathers are whoever you want to be. Maybe they thought they were capitalizing on Hamilton's success but people love Hamilton because it's good, not for some vague fandom for the American Revolution. The protagonist is John Adams, who is decidedly less interesting than Alexander Hamilton. His main characterization is that he was annoying and disliked. He is strongly pro-independence. And he does not compromise.

The play is pretty boring to be honest. There aren't that many songs. There are long stretches of debate that are completely without music. It really makes you appreciate Cabinet Battle. And the music that does exist is mostly forgettable, and kind of irrelevant. What is that Egg song? I expected bigger for the opener or the Act I finale, or indeed the Act II finale.

The plot is pretty empty. In the first act, they clearly do not have the votes for independence. We're never really told how they convince everyone to come around by the end. There is a discussion about slavery, which doesn't really answer why the southern states become amenable to independence. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention had it pretty good because of slavery. They complain about taxes and mistreatment by the crown, but they have it comparatively good if you consider the way Britain treated its other colonies and certainly if you consider how the colonists were treating their slaves. The fact of the matter is that those who opposed independence were pretty satisfied with the status quo. It's the reason they ignore George Washington's entreaties for military support. We don't really get a sense of why they opposed independence nor what convinces them to change their mind.

Westworld (2016-22)

Westworld was supposed to be HBO's successor to Game of Thrones in terms of epic fantasy and expense and violence and nudity. And it had a promising start. Season 1 was top notch TV. It delivered on the spectacle and the mind-blowing twists. And it had a philosophical bent to it. There were some really beautiful, poignant episodes--I specifically remember Akechata's Season 2 episode 8 titled Kiksuya. Season 2 was actually quite good in retrospect with its biblical scope, but I didn't see that until the end. While watching season 2, I found it to be kind of a drag. Seasons 3 and 4 did absolutely nothing for me. They were so complicated and boring. How did they lose the magic of Season 1? It became a totally different show. Once they left the park and entered "reality" it became too convoluted. And it's not like season 1 was even easy to follow. I'm glad they finally pulled the plug because I had felt obligated to slog through the last two seasons.

Camp Siegfried (Second Stage) (2022)

We got free tickets to Camp Siegfried through Culture Card. I probably wouldn't have paid money to see this. It's only 90 minutes without intermission but it felt longer. It's about two teenagers at a pro-Nazi camp on Long Island in 1938. It's a love story. And that kind of obscures the whole Nazi thing. I thought it would be a lot more explicitly anti-Nazi than it was. The setting isn't really all that important to the main plot, but as an audience member it's impossible to look past. Just start with the description of the play in the playbill...it doesn't even mention the Nazi sympathies. It implicitly condones it by not explicitly condemning it. And it's pretty boring overall.

The best part by far is the set. It felt like being outside. There isn't quite a stage, it's a hill built into the theater. And there are branches hanging from the ceiling to simulate trees. There is one mesmerizing scene in which they construct a platform in the side of the hill with planks and mallets. They they use the platform in a few different ways. But later in the play the reveal another platform on the left side of the stage, which comes down like a murphy bed and acts as a pier/dock. The lighting is maybe too good that the darkness put me to sleep. I kind of dozed off after the platform scene. The seats in the theater were nice leather.

The Little Drummer Girl (2018)

I usually find John le Carre's spy thrillers to be slow and boring. But honestly I thought The Little Drummer Girl was a brilliant slow burn. It was intense and legitimately thrilling. It's a tight six episodes. The Mossad don't mess around. They recruit an English actress to go undercover and infiltrate a Palestinian group plotting terrorist attacks in Europe. What's especially interesting about that is that she's an actress playing a part. Of course, that's all undercover work, but it's not usually framed as acting. Usually, the spy has certain sympathies but we're never quite sure where her sympathies lie. She waivers because she's an actress first. In the Mossad agents too, Gadi acknowledges that they may not be the good guys. That's a devastating admission for a spy. 

Park Chan-wook's production is ravishing. The colors, the composition and the camera movement are distinctive Park.  After watching Decision to Leave, I wanted more Park and I'm glad to have finally checked this one off the list. I hadn't realized what a great starry cast he had but was pleasantly surprised. The undercover actress is played by a never better Florence Pugh. She is good in everything. Her handler is played by Alexander Skarsgard. He too plays a part, her target. It allows her to rehearse and learn her character. It reminds me of In the Mood for Love because as they role play, they too begin to fall in love. They blur the line between acting and reality. Michael Shannon plays the leader of the Mossad team and he is fantastic.