The Alienist (2018) s02e03 – Labyrinth

Okay, whoever oversees “The Alienist” and thought to hire Gina Gionfriddo to write this episode but not the whole series… is it good this person hired a competent writer, or is it bad they knew to hire a competent writer but chose not to the rest of the time. Given the show is all about Dakota Fanning and her late nineteenth century female detective agency—Gionfriddo writes Fanning so well I want a team-up with “Miss Fisher,” time differences be damned—someone should’ve thought to get a writer who can write for Fanning. And Gionfriddo does a fantastic job with it. It does from being peculiarly not as bad as usual to actually not bad to wait a second to oh, wow, it’s actually good. Is “Alienist: Angel of Darkness” going to be good now?

No.

No, it is not. Because even though Gionfriddo writes this great arc for Fanning as she goes to visit Michael McElhatton’s hospital of horrors, where she meets and bonds with nurse Rosy McEwen, everything falls apart once Fanning checks in with Daniel Brühl. There’s a big exposition dump as Fanning recounts everything, which manages to be double negative—not only is it an utter waste of the audience’s time, having Fanning report to Brühl’s got some optics. Or would, if anyone was pretending Brühl’s important to the story. Oh, wait, he gets Bruna Cusí to almost sort of remember something important but not really and it takes up half the episode and they pretend it’s thrilling and dangerous.

Except it’s not.

The good stuff is the McEwen and Fanning bonding stuff and the Fanning detecting stuff. The rest of it is just “Alienist” crap, complete with Matthew Shear’s ostensible C plot turning out to be an absolutely nothing subplot because “Alienist” loves to feint at subplots for the familiar background players. Always has.

And Luke Evans?

He’s in this show still.

It’s unclear why. Even more so than Brühl. Just give Fanning a show. And hire Gionfriddo to run it.

The Alienist (2018) s02e02 – Something Wicked

This episode we meet Luke Evans’s editor at the newspaper—I think he’s at the New York Times; doesn’t really matter; Demetri Goritsas plays the editor. Goritsas is terrible. And somewhat indicative of the show’s casting choices. It really doesn’t care if anyone’s good. Not if it can get the… scares, I guess. Thrills? Chills? Grosses? “Alienist” is grosser than it is scary or thrilling or chilling. Anyway. Bad script by Stuart Carolan again, barely competent direction from David Caffrey. And only if you don’t count the performances against Caffrey. If you did, well, “Alienist” would just be entirely risible.

There’s more of what one would call character development if Carolan’s script weren’t so bad and the performances weren’t—generally—so wanting. Evans’s girlfriend (or fiancée) Emily Barber is daughter—in actuality illegitimate daughter but the show doesn’t address it—of Matt Letscher’s William Randolph Hearst. Barber’s not good but the writing for her is atrocious. And everyone in the show keeps reminding Evans he’s really in love with Dakota Fanning, though he still plays his scenes with her brotherly enough. She’s abjectly disinterested in him—seriously, all the show’s got going for it at this point is Fanning’s performance is captivating. It’s not even necessarily successful, just captivating. The way she moves, how she reacts, Fanning puts in a lot of work.

As opposed to top-billed Daniel Brühl, who doesn’t put in any real work. He just does the thing where he’s knowingly obnoxious and socially awkward—actually, more like imposing—then doesn’t react at all when people seem put out. I wonder what the script pages look like for this show; are they giving Brühl direction or no. Like, first season he was a would-be movie star turned cable limited series star… this season he’s just a TV show actor. He gets zero prestige whereas Fanning—much more deservingly, obviously—gets it all.

Robert Wisdom gets shoehorned in for a pointless cameo, there are some red herring street toughs, Ted Levine’s silly in his leprechaun audition, and Michael McElhatton is terrible as the doctor. I don’t think there are any more babies in danger this episode—oh, wait am I saying, there’s a caged Spanish baby. Though “Alienist” isn’t making any statements. Statements would take more than Carolan’s got.

Watchmen (2019) s01e09 – See How They Fly

I’ve been trying to gin up enthusiasm to write about this “Watchmen” finale all day. Though, if I think hard enough, I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with a compliment. Something like… thanks to “Watchmen: The Series,” Robert Wisdom’s most… unappreciative recent casting is no longer “The Alienist.” Wisdom shows up in this episode as the newspaper vendor who gets to do a newspaper vendor stand-in for the end of the world (again), though this time he gets paired with Ozymandias (Jeremy Irons).

And, I guess if I’m continuing on the qualified compliments… Irons is a lot better this episode than expected. Sure, it’s because Hong Chau is not, but it’s not like Chau is James Wolk or something. Wolk is truly godawful. Chau’s just disappointing.

Jolie Hoang-Rappaport’s still good as Chau’s assistant though. “Watchmen: The HBO Event Mini-Series”’s successes are few and few between. Cherish them. Even if they don’t make the viewing experience any less ponderous. Though, yeah, if you’re willing to let “Watchmen” get away with a lousy Clair de Lune accompaniment, maybe you’re going to let it get away with a 2001 rip-off. I mean, after the Schindler’s List thing, doing an obvious 2001 callback… well, no, the former is just an excruciatingly cynical eye-roll, the latter is actually comically godawful.

But if you’re willing to cut “Watchmen” that amount of slack already… who cares if the ending is an intentional cop-out, but before that cop-out lazy and trite. I mean, at least the original score functions like an old John Carpenter score again?

I do like how little respect the show has for its audience, when it draws attention to things and tells the viewer to pay attention, then does a flashback anyway because it doesn’t trust them to pay attention. Just like Watchmen the comic. As well as short-changing the entire cast. Because Watchmen the comic did the… oops, no. No, it did not.

The show uses some cheap tricks to get things done in the episode, which “corrects” the ending of the original series. Or something.

If Damon Lindelof had any gumption, he would’ve done a show about trying to adapt Watchmen and why everyone fails at it and sequelizing it. Or do something about how DC and Warner Bros. screwed Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, lying to them for years. Not to mention propping up the Watchmen trade sales while waiting for Hollywood to figure out how to exploit the property.

But he doesn’t. Because Lindelof’s got no gumption. No spoilers but he’s a lot more Return of the Jedi-era George Lucas than anything else… which makes him perfect for a “Disney Star Wars” show.

I think the most disappointing thing is I really thought the show was going to give Lou Gossett Jr. a great mainstream role.

It does not. But it gives him even less of one than expected. And expectations have been dwindling for a while.

As for Regina King… she doesn’t make it worth watching, which is a travesty. It wastes her. Completely.

Back when the Watchmen movie came out a friend who I don’t think had read the comic said it (the movie) proved you could do a different kind of superhero narrative, even if Watchmen didn’t do it successfully. The TV show doesn’t even reach that level; it doesn’t prove its conceptual case, much less do it successfully. It really does make me wonder how people experience reading the comic book, because clearly they’re getting something very different from it than I ever do.

All that said, I really hope I remember not to get roped into Season Two in a few years after they say they’re not doing another season then do another season a little later than expected; maybe an HBO Max exclusive.

A sellout’s adaptation of Watchmen needs the sellout Alan Moore and Damon Lindelof is not the sellout Alan Moore. I mean, have you ever read a Damon Lindelof comic book? They’re terrible. Like his TV shows. Sellouts can make good sellout product, which Lindelof utterly fails at doing here.

The Hot Zone (2019) s01

I don’t get to make this statement very often anymore and even less about bestsellers and TV miniseries but I’ve read the book.

The Hot Zone. I’ve read the book by Richard Preston (who is sadly not this guy, Robert Preston). Well, okay, I haven’t read the book. I listened to the book. It’s a good book. Highly recommended if you want to see how “popular non-fiction thrillers” can be done well. It’s so good at that format when I listened to Console Wars and got super-creeped out by the casual misogyny, sometimes downright silly bad writing, lionization of middling White capitalists, and odd “Japanese voice” thing, I kept going because it reminded me of Hot Zone.

I eventually gave up on Console Wars because there’s only so much time in the world and the book has actually got zero to say.

But I didn’t give up on “The Hot Zone,” the event miniseries (aired/run on National Geographic, but produced by Fox TV); even though the miniseries only reminded me of The Hot Zone the book, I finished watching it. Because why not. Even though it never gets to the best parts of said book, even though it’s a terribly plotted television show—Kelly Souders, Brian Peterson, and Jeff Vintar are questionable show runners. James V. Hart, who might have written a movie treatment back when Hot Zone was a best-seller and Outbreak hadn’t come out yet, writes a bunch of the episodes too. Or contributes. He gets the “created by” credit, even though he doesn’t write the first episode, which breaks with tradition. At least with tradition as I understand it from watching television too much for too long.

If you’ve read the book and you remember the cave, the cave isn’t in the movie. Instead you get created for the miniseries fictional White guys Liam Cunningham and James D’Arcy hunting the disease in Africa, taking stories away from, you know, Africans. Cunningham is a Scottish Indiana Jones type—the young-age makeup on him, which is mostly just foundation and hair dye, works; it’s a shame Cunningham has zero chemistry with “lead” Julianna Margulies in the present. The present being 1989, flashbacks being 1976. D’Arcy is the square who gets roped into Cunningham’s mad quest to find a lethal virus. The show wants to pretend he’s some kind of zealot but he’s not, neither in script or performance. Maybe it’s because the writers wouldn’t know how to give him that amount of character; the directors (Michael Uppendahl and Nick Murphy) wouldn’t know how to direct for it anyway. They’re really bad.

Canada also doesn’t stand in for Washington D.C. well. The show says it’s “inspired by true events” while the book was true events told in an inspired fashion. It’s a bummer because a good show runner could do wonders with the book. They even have some of the “do wonders” possibilities in the show and do jack shit with them.

The casting doesn’t help either. “Golden Globe-winning star of ‘The Good Wife’” Margulies plays the ostensible lead, who fights against sexism in the U.S. Army’s infectious diseases institutions and basically loses that fight. Margulies’s performance in “Hot Zone” is about the same as a lazy episode of “Good Wife.” She’s fine, never anything more, which is fine for “Hot Zone.” Good for “Hot Zone,” actually.

Topher Grace is bad as her de facto sidekick, the sexist civilian scientist who gets the most sympathetic arc when he thinks he’s got Ebola and has to go to get tested in an AIDS testing speakeasy. The show has this whole juxtaposing of AIDS and Ebola reactions, which I don’t remember in the book but if it was in the book, it wouldn’t have been as poorly handled as in the miniseries. It’s not a bad idea, it’s just the show doesn’t have the producers, writers, or directors to properly explore good ideas. It’s a bummer.

Cunningham and D’Arcy are caricatures, but who cares. They’re not as bad as Grace or as comically ineffectual as Noah Emmerich, who’s Margulies’s husband and the family’s Mr. Mom. One of the many lazy character “development” moments has Emmerich telling Margulies she’s more important to the family than him, even though he’s the only one who does anything with the kids except drive them to school. Once. She takes them once. But only because it can work in the “AIDS panic” sub-sub-subplot and Margulies changing from her Alicia Florick outfit to her Army camo in her car because she’s that kind of go getter.

The show also chokes on the Chuck Shamata as Margulies’s dying dad subplot, which has a lot of potential but not with these writers, not with this show.

Robert Wisdom is fine as Margulies and Emmerich’s commanding officer but it’s more of an extended “Oh, shit, it’s Bunny Colvin!” cameo.

Paul James isn’t good, isn’t bad as Grace’s flunky.

Robert Sean Leonard is similar. He’s there to make things feel less Canadian. Ditto racist Nick Searcy (not his character, just Nick Searcy; he’s not a nice man). Unfortunately, Searcy gives a fantastic performance. At least as far as the script takes him, which isn’t very far because the teleplays aren’t good. Even when they’re not bad.

Twenty-five years after The Hot Zone, given all the advances in scientific knowledge, television narrative, streaming narrative, CG, whatever, you’d think it’d be the perfect time to adapt the book. But “The Hot Zone” ain’t it. I’m not sure Outbreak is much better, minute-by-minute, but it’s a lot shorter and a lot less disappointing.

Read the book.